Re: Extension packaging

[Andrew J. Schorr]

On Tue, May 10, 2022 at 07:54:29PM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > But this still may have some problems with installation paths.
> > We need to make sure that the shared libaries end up in the AWKLIBPATH
> > directory, as revealed by:
> >    gawk 'BEGIN {print ENVIRON["AWKLIBPATH"]}'
> 
> ... this surprises me: since this project is specifically for building
> extension libraries for Gawk, why doesn't "make install" automatically
> install the shared libraries in the right place?  All it needs to do,
> to know where that is, is to ask Gawk itself, right?  Or provide a
> separate configure switch for the user to specify that explicitly.  So
> what am I missing here?

I think what's missing is an installation script designed for end users,
which is what we're discussing here. The existing tarballs
use standard autotools stuff and typical configure scripts. I have
not hacked them to auto-detect the gawk location. The point of a
gawkext installation script would be to add that type of intelligence.
For a developer, it would not necessarily be a plus for the configure
script to start making guesses about where to install things.  A developer
might be testing with multiple versions of gawk, for example.

Regards,
Andy