Re: Lazy run-time linking of PCRE and similar

[Tony Abou-Assaleh]

Hi Reuben,

I don't think anyone responded to this message, so I'm going to chip in.

The latest grep in the repository already depends on newer autotools.
Supporting older dependencies in the repository doesn't seem to be a
concern.

Backward compatibility becomes important when compiling grep from released
source. Makefile in the repository has 'dist' as one of the targets to
make source releases. I currently maintain CVS tarballs at:

http://www.dal-acm.ca/~taa/grep/

I don't know enough about libtools and such to comment on that part.

Cheers,

TAA

-----------------------------------------------------
Tony Abou-Assaleh
Email:    address@hidden
Web site: http://tony.abou-assaleh.net
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On Wed, 22 Aug 2007, Reuben Thomas wrote:

> I wrote to the list not long ago to express an interest in implementing this
> feature (which is in the TODO list).
>
> I already have a working Debian-specific patch, which I now need to
> generalise. The obvious way to do this is to use libtool's libltdl, but grep
> doesn't currently seem to use libtool. Would this be acceptable? I'd need to
> add libtool support to configure.ac, and it would probably be best to add
> libltdl to the grep repository, so that grep doesn't depend on either its
> presence or on a particular version being installed on users' systems.
>
> My patch currently uses libdl, so I could also simply detect that in
> configure.ac and use it if available, but that would lose support for HP-UX
> and Windows, among others.
>
> What would the developers prefer? In particular, I use up-to-date autotools,
> so it would be useful to know whether I should support older-than-current
> versions.
>
> (By the way, I have signed an FSF copyright assignment for grep.)
>
> --
> http://rrt.sc3d.org/ | partisan, n.  an adherent without sense (Bierce)
>
>