Re: Extension packaging

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Tue, 10 May 2022 12:58:16 -0400
> From: "Andrew J. Schorr" <aschorr@telemetry-investments.com>
> Cc: mcollado2011@gmail.com, pjfarley3@earthlink.net, bug-gawk@gnu.org
> 
> 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.

What is the difference between end users and developers, in this
regard?

> 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.

If you envision the need to install in a non-standard directory, you
can provide a configure-time switch for that, and leave the default at
what makes sense for users.  I think.