Re: [Bug-readline] making shared link failures fatal

[Mike Frysinger]

On Sat, Mar 26, 2011 at 1:47 PM, Chet Ramey wrote:
> On 3/25/11 2:55 PM, Mike Frysinger wrote:
>>> The question is whether or not a failure to build the shared version of
>>> readline should cause the build to fail, even if the static library is
>>> created successfully.
>>
>> i cant see how ignoring the shared link is sane anymore.  what
>> reasonable OS doesnt use shared libraries anymore ?
>
> That doesn't have anything to do with it.  If I've made a mistake in
> shobj-conf or shlib-install, should that kill the build?  It's ok if
> your answer is "yes," and I'm open to the discussion.

i think it should die.  otherwise, i imagine some people wont notice.
if they're installing by hand, they'll probably clobber the old files
(headers/static), and could possibly continue using the old shared
library.  if they're installing via a package manager, the guy taking
care of that can easily include the patch so that the end person never
notices.

>> how unreasonable is it really to have the 1 or 2 random people running
>> on old pos hardware to pass --disable-shared at configure time ?
>>
>> or even better, why not just convert to libtool already ?  every other
>> major project out there has long ago switched to libtool.  that would
>> detect whether the target supports shared libraries at configure time
>> and disable it by default.
>
> I'd advise you to take a look at it before shooting from the hip next
> time.  The readline build system has always detected supported and
> unsupported systems at configure time.  It's reasonable to have a
> discussion about this, but don't pull bogus arguments out of your ass
> to do it.

i dont see any arguments pulled from my ass here, so i dont know what
you're referring to.  libtool has obvious advantages -- you no longer
have to maintain your own hand coded list of targets/flags/etc... for
how to build up shared code.  what reason is there nowadays for doing
so other than "we already know what we have today" ?  i dont see any
downsides to the conversion other than time to implement.
-mike