Re: MinGw port of gawkextlib

[Andrew J. Schorr]

On Tue, May 17, 2022 at 02:53:46PM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> I don't think it's reasonable to ask users to remember the prefix used
> when installing Gawk.  They might not even know that if they didn't
> build Gawk themselves.  And MS-Windows users are likely not to grasp
> the notion of "install prefix" as easily as Unix users.  By contrast,
> "directory where you have Gawk" is easily understood and relatively
> easily discovered if not known in advance.

The issue here is that we also need to know where to find the "gawkapi.h"
header file that is bundled with gawk, in addition to locating the gawk binary.
That's why it's a directory instead of just the path of the gawk binary. In a
typical installation, the header file might go in /usr/include/gawkapi.h, and
the binary in /usr/bin/gawk. So in that case, the implicit argument is
"--with-gawk=/usr".

I think the idea is that if somebody chooses to install gawk in
a non-standard location, then yes, the burden is on that user to
remember what the --prefix argument was that he/she used to install gawk.

Regards,
Andy