How does one declare non-lisp dependencies?

[Robert P. Goldman]

You could certainly create a class of ASDF component that would represent software packages/libraries like libfixposix.

Then you would have the PERFORM methods on the objects of this class simply check for the presence of the library. You could have other ASDF components depend on objects of this class.

Probably the trickiest thing would be to write the methods to check for presence of the libraries, which would have to mirror all the ways your C compiler and/or CFFI might find them, in order to avoid false negatives where ASDF would error out, although the build would have been successful.

For C libraries built with make folks at my company have banged together a class like this, but not for libraries that are installed by .deb, rpm, Mac ports, brew, cygwin, etc, etc

Sent from my iPhone

> On Apr 27, 2016, at 21:06, Ian Tegebo <ian.tegebo at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> While quickloading IOLib, g++ raised an error because it couldn't find "lfp.h".  After digging around a bit, I realized I needed to install libfixposix.  It seems like ASDF would already have a way to express this dependency, resulting in a clearer error message.
> 
> If this doesn't already exist, what's the way to go about it?  A :before method on prepare-op for cffi components (or some such, I'm just bluffing here)?
> 
> -- 
> Ian Tegebo