Hello David,
I should have answered your mail earlier, but I keep forgetting things..
David Cantrell wrote:
NB: this has been sent to several mailing lists. Watch those replies!
Dave Golden and I have been hacking on Devel::CheckLib, which
should be
on a CPAN mirror near you soon. It's similar to Devel::CheckOS, in
that
it will let module authors specify dependencies which aren't just
other
perl modules - if they need, eg, libjpeg, then they can use this
module in
Makefile.PL / Build.PL to make it a pre-req, and if it's missing then
the CPAN testers will SHUT THE HELL UP ABOUT IT and not annoy the
author.
It's still in something of a state of flux so not ready for real-
world use
yet, but we're at the stage where we need lots of people to beat it
to hell
and back. Please try to run the tests on as many platforms as
possible,
with as many perls as possible, and in particular using perls built
with
as many compilers and linkers as possible.
I had begun working on a module like this last year. It would have
been part of the refactoring of the Makefile.PL of Net::Pcap, itself
borrowed from XML::LibXML's, then improved. The first part is already
on the CPAN as the module ExtUtils::FindFunctions, which tries to
detect the functions present in a library. The second is is
ExtUtils::FindLibrary, not yet released, which is mainly the
have_library() function in Net::Pcap Makefile.PL. It's more
heavyweight than the code current present in Devel::CheckLib, but it
works nice on Unix, Win32 and Cygwin given that Net::Pcap only had
PASSes for the last stable releases.
The more alert of you will have noticed that there is a bootstrapping
problem in using this from within a Makefile.PL - relax, it will come
with a script to bundle itself in an inc/ directory.
ExtUtils::FindFunctions and ExtUtils::FindLibrary do this as well
with their included commands. The code is simple but you can copy it
if you want.
--
Sébastien Aperghis-Tramoni
Close the world, txEn eht nepO.
