[ On Thursday, June 7, 2001 at 20:02:32 (-0400), Johnny C. Lam wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: The infamous hidden dependencies problem 
>
> This is a relatively cool idea, though I see some minor problems with
> it.  Firstly, you'd need to list every single library that is used by
> a package, which seems to be slightly onerous.

Well, every non-standard library (eg. not '-lc') :-)

But why's that onerous?   That's part of software configuration to
specify all the components necessary.  Pkgsrc mandates it anyway!  (with
DEPENDS)

Hmmm.... maybe there's a way to tie DEPENDS in with the -I/-L stuff....

>  Secondly, you'd still
> have to patch a lot of configure scripts since not all authors use the
> AC_CHECK_LIB macro;

I think that's the biggest problem, though it may "go away" in time if
users of Autoconf become happy and accustomed with its way of doing
things....

> several packages create their own macros to check
> for librares.  Thirdly, this only solves the problem for GNU
> autoconf-based packages.  I think that we need something more general
> to isolate the build environment for all the packages, which is why
> I'm pushing this buildlink.mk idea.

The two may be necessary together in some cases....

consider what'll happen if PREFIX=/usr/local -- I'd bet some packages
will look there anyway, even if LDFLAGS doesn't include any "-L".

and even worse if $PREFIX/lib contains non-pkgsrc stuff....

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods@acm.org>     <woods@robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>;   Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>