On Sun, 19 Sep 2010, Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll wrote: > Autoconf is giving you a fake sense of security. Outside of standard > features, the list of tests to be made is proportional to the number of > differences of those platforms. And even then one cannot add those tests > without checking > the platform first. I mean I cannot add a check for -lintl without _knowing_ > in advance in which platform it is going to succeed because that test may > have the wrong effect in another platform.
It's not quite that black-box. When you find something doesn't link due to a missing symbol, and you find that -lintl fixes it, then you have a test case for autoconf. Autoconf even provides utilities for writing test programs that detect when a symbol is unresolved. If the test passes without -lintl, then that library is not used. If it only passes with -lintl, then you don't care what OS you're on until somebody else finds a case where this breaks things. Much better than tracking known platforms which need the lib. We can long for the day when C/C++ header files have some knowledge of their compilation units, or for a system tool that tells you which library contains a missing symbol; but until then we're stuck with lookup tables and tests. The latter tend to be more robust. All systems (including CL) have such problems; hence automated tests are here to stay. - Daniel ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Start uncovering the many advantages of virtual appliances and start using them to simplify application deployment and accelerate your shift to cloud computing. http://p.sf.net/sfu/novell-sfdev2dev _______________________________________________ Ecls-list mailing list Ecls-list@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ecls-list
