-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 8/29/10 08:05 , Ivan Lazar Miljenovic wrote: > On 29 August 2010 21:46, Andrew Coppin <andrewcop...@btinternet.com> wrote: >>> a) No standard place to find C include files. >>> b) No standard place to find libraries. >>> c) No standard way to find if common open source libraries are >>> installed and where. >> >> As best as I can tell, the Unix Standard Way(tm) to do this kind of thing is >> to put files into "well known" locations so that they can be easily found. >> (The fact that tools like autoconf need to exist tells you something about >> how tricky this can be.) > > No, autoconf has nothing to do with where the "well known" locations > are. It's having to deal with different versions, etc. of libraries.
Not entirely true; it also deals (or used to deal) with the fact that you may have stuff in /opt/SUNWsft (Solaris), /opt/kde (SuSE), /usr/local, /opt/local (MacPorts), /sw (Fink), etc. Then again, that's what pkg-config deals with these days, leaving autoconf to deal with different APIs/ABIs (different versions, different build options) as long as the software you're building is up to date. >> Regardless, you'd think Cabal could provide some way to make it "easy" to >> state where the files it needs actually are. Currently it does not. > > Well, it uses ghc-pkg to record where the various libraries, etc. are. > Otherwise, it could be that none of the Cabal developers are really > that familiar with the "best practices" of developing Windows software > (and clobbering the registry whilst your at it). Note that Cabal is no better at tracking location of non-Haskell resources on Unix. (In fact, isn't that what started this topic?) > By the way, is it possible to have a globally installed library in > Windows (for C, etc.) that can be used no matter which IDE or editor > you use? Or does each IDE manage all that on its own? DLLs can be put into C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 or equivalent (e.g. Windows NT liked to install itself in C:\WINNT instead of C:\WINDOWS). LIB files are less standard and I'm under the impression that every IDE uses its own notion of where to put them (and may not use the registry in a non-opaque way). BTW, if there *is* some standard registry tree that can be used for this, it should be possible to provide a Windows version of pkg-config that would hide most of this. Replacing autoconf is harder, though it might be possible to work from configure.in (or even configure.am when automake is involved). - -- brandon s. allbery [linux,solaris,freebsd,perl] allb...@kf8nh.com system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allb...@ece.cmu.edu electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university KF8NH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.10 (Darwin) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAkx6k60ACgkQIn7hlCsL25UeugCdGEYqFmU0GstywKpFaTwDTGHn 1+cAoNNz8A7sM/XM2GCQdeFSTY/ML5hY =eK9N -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe