Re: gawkextlib installation issues

[Andrew J. Schorr]

On Thu, May 19, 2022 at 01:30:28PM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> Btw, while looking into this, I found another subtle problem with the
> gawk-mpfr's configure script:  when configured like this:
...

> The loop over all the matches for "$withval"/lib* adds to LDFLAGS
> directories that could cause trouble.  In my case, some of the matches
> for lib* included old and incompatible libraries, which failed the
> link with -lgmp for reasons completely unrelated to GMP itself.
> 
> This means that --with-gmp, --with-mpfr, and --with-gawkextlib cannot
> be safely given with a value of $prefix, but should instead be
> given with the value of $prefix/lib.
> 
> One possible fix would be to explicitly check for lib64, but even that
> could be problematic, since one could have, say, 32-bit and 64-bit
> libraries in 2 separate directories, and the above test could pick up
> the wrong one.

Interesting. I'm not certain that we can build a bullet-proof script
that will protect against every idiosyncratic setup. What we can do
is improve documentation and add options to make sure people are able
to get it to work if they know what they are doing.

For Unix users, we try to support 2 general cases:

1. Packages are installed in the standard locations under /usr,
and no configure arguments are required, because the binaries and
libraries and include files are in the standard directories that will
be found automatically.

2. A particular package was installed in a nonstandard directory tree using
--prefix, in which case the various "--with-*" options just need to point
to that prefix.

If people do unexpected things, like installing side-by-side 32-bit
and 64-bit packages under the same prefix, it seems impossible to do
the right thing without further direction from the installer. But it's
possible that we may need more configure script arguments to enable that.

One could generally have more granular "--with-<package>-include-dir"
and "--with-<package>-lib-dir" options. Is that what's needed?
Or should we leave it as is for now?

Regards,
Andy