[Ecls-list] ecl is linking unnecessarily to libintl.so (at least on OpenSolaris)

[Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll]

On Sun, Sep 19, 2010 at 3:30 AM, Dr. David Kirkby
<david.kirkby at onetel.net>wrote:

> On 09/18/10 11:36 PM, Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll wrote:
>
>  What should I check for? What should I need on each version of Solaris
>> that
>> exists out there? There is no way to treat that platform in a portable way
>> if that is waht you mean. It is not portable at all what the solaris
>> people
>> opted for (having a separate library for sockets and also other libraries
>> I
>> do not even know what for), and it is also not portable their changes
>> among
>> OS releases. Autoconf does not help here: one would have to hardcode the
>> knowledge of which libraries are needed and which are not.
>>
>
> One of the points about autoconf is you can make a test program and compile
> that. You should not need to hard-code information about a specific
> platform, but test on that platform.
>

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.

In this case we are not talking about the existence or not of a library or
of a function, but which libraries are needed on a certain platform to get a
certain feature. That is not a portability check: it needs the history of
that operating system, which chose to go an incompatible path. Now the
question is when did Solaris stop needing intl library when linking sockets,
if it ever did -- if it is used internally for error messages its need might
not be obvious.

Juanjo

-- 
Instituto de Física Fundamental, CSIC
c/ Serrano, 113b, Madrid 28006 (Spain)
http://juanjose.garciaripoll.googlepages.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mailman.common-lisp.net/pipermail/ecl-devel/attachments/20100919/0dbb61ec/attachment.html>