Re: Volunteer to add AC_CHECK_LIB() for iconv routines?

[<br...@ph...>]

Ethan Merritt wrote:
> It suggests adding an AC_CHECK_LIB() macro to the configuration script 
> that checks for the iconv routines.  Maybe we should do that.

I don't think so.  The actual problem here is that a gnuplot build was 
failing on functions in -liconv, which gnuplot doesn't use at all.  I 
can see no sane reason we should have to check for a library which we 
never use.

The dependence on this library was introduced by -lgd, in that case, and 
as far as I can tell, the actual reason the build failed was that our 
configure script checks for the existence of gdlib-config (which exists 
for the exact purpose of informing us about such dependencies of -lgd on 
other libraries) but still insists on trying its own tests even if 
gdlib-config was found.  That feels quite wrong to me.  I think that if 
we did find gdlib-config, all direct tests for libgd features have to be 
done against output of that tool.

The second half of the original problem may well have been that the OP's 
gdlib-config was buggy.