Re: installable gnulib library

[Gary V. Vaughan]

Hi Bruno,

On 11 Oct 2010, at 09:19, Gary V. Vaughan wrote:
>>> It occurs to me also, that when another gnulib using project (that relies on
>>> non-libposix modules) wants to minimise it's configury by requiring 
>>> libposix,
>>> gnulib-tool will need an --avoid-posix option or similar so as not to end up
>>> pulling another copy of the posix modules and their dependencies into the
>>> new project.
>> 
>> Hmm. That's a good point. But often the projects (especially coreutils)
>> need the newest stuff from gnulib, and a libposix.so that is 6 months old
>> will cover maybe 80% but not 100% of what coreutils wants.
> 
> In that case, coreutils could drive impetus for a new release of libposix...
> an old libposix that is not good enough for coreutils is going to be deficient
> for other clients too.
> 
>> But for other packages, which add libposix to their required dependencies,
>> such an option would be useful. Should I implement it? Other thoughts about 
>> it?
> 
> If you can add it easily, that would be great.  I won't be able to make use
> of it until libposix is easily available though, so if it's anything other
> than trivial, it can wait until we've nailed down the libposix implementation.

Actually, I'm now thinking that it might be cleaner to reinvoke the
`posix-modules` script to get the list of modules to avoid... but that
should be the modules contained in the installed libposix, rather than
the list in whatever version of gnulib happens to be in PATH right now.

In that case, libposix could install a `avoid-libposix-provided-modules`
script or similar that emits:

   --avoid strcspn --avoid strdup --avoid strndup .....

And libposix using packages would then invoke *their* gnulib-tool as:

  gnulib-tool --import <normal-arguments> `avoid-libposix-provided-modules`

Alternatively, if that is too ugly, libposix could install a wrapper-script
for gnulib-tool that strips out module names that it already provides and
adds the appropriate --avoid options.

Cheers,
-- 
Gary V. Vaughan (address@hidden)

PGP.sig
Description: This is a digitally signed message part