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

[Daniel Herring]

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