[be] [task #8307] check for runtime dependencies from ./configure to bibledit

[Teus Benschop]

URL:
  <http://savannah.nongnu.org/task/?8307>

                 Summary: check for runtime dependencies from ./configure to
bibledit
                 Project: Bibledit
            Submitted by: teus
            Submitted on: Friday 06/20/2008 at 06:14
         Should Start On: Friday 06/20/2008 at 00:00
   Should be Finished on: Friday 06/20/2008 at 00:00
                Priority: 5 - Normal
                  Status: None
             Assigned to: None
             Open/Closed: Open
         Discussion Lock: Any

    _______________________________________________________

Details:

To implement the following:



On 18/06/08 10:41 PM Teus Benschop wrote:
> Neil Mayhew wrote:
>> I'm not sure this should be a requirement of the build process. git needs
to be on the machine where bibledit will run, but as far as I can tell it's
not needed to build bibledit. So I don't think the configure script should
require it.
>
> Without the git program bibledit is rather crippled. For that reason the
./configure script checks that git is there. The configure script also check
that zip is there, and tee, and unzip and gzip, and so on, a whole lot of
dependencies that are not needed to build, but are required for proper
operation of Bibledit.

I agree, but I don't think that configure is the right place to do it.

> Git is required at ./configure stage, because I am afraid that if this
would not be done there would be people who just install it without git, and
forget about the rest being lazy, and then make support calls saying this or
that functionality does not work, and what to do.

Again, I see your point, but configure doesn't entirely solve the problem. It
does, for people building from source and installing on the same machine, but
hopefully this will become quite rare as Bibledit becomes packaged (and kept
up-to-date) for various systems. However, it doesn't solve the problem for
someone who is given a binary from a friend, or who copies it to one of their
other computers, or who subsequently removes one of the necessary packages
(like git) from their system.

I think it would be much better to have a check in Bibledit at startup, so
that it refuses to run if git, zip, tee, gzip etc. aren't there. You can do
that like this:

   if (system("which git") != 0 || system("which zip") != 0 || ... )
      refuseToRun();

You could, of course, factor that into a subroutine that takes an array of
command names and returns a single result.

--Neil







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