Re: [wxhaskell-users] Re: [Haskell] Announce: wxHaskell 0.6

[Daan L. <daa...@xs...>]

On Wed, 03 Mar 2004 14:26:00 +0000, Matthew Walton <ma...@al...> wrote:

>> You don't have to do that. If you give "--prefix" to configure it will work fine.
>> You can also give "--libdir" explicitly. When you specify "--help" at the end of
>> the options, you get a nice overview of all settings that will be used.
>
> That works for some packages but we can never be sure it will work for all, because quite a few programs and libraries encode run-time paths in their binaries based on the settings of prefix and related such options given to configure. Because we ultimately want the build system to install it to a different place to the place it will actually be run in, that can cause serious problems.
>
> Can you guarantee that wxHaskell does not have any such compile-time-encoded paths in it?

I can't guarantee it as I haven't tested myself on gentoo, but I believe that wxhaskell has
no compile-time encoded paths in its generated libraries. During linking I use "--soname"
to remove the directory part -- relying on the linker to find it (using LD_LIBRARY_PATH for
example, or by putting it in the same directory as the executable, or ...)

> A common solution is an install target allowing specification of a target directory to be used instead

Good idea, maybe I'll make that an extra option if that proves useful for gentoo unix.
Andres Loh is using Gentoo and he works just across my office so it would be relatively
painless to do some testing :-)

Thanks for the feedback,
-- Daan.


> I may be wrong, but I believe the GNU autotools make this kind of thing quite easy to do these days.

I guess that is right, but the autotools gave me too much trouble to
work across platforms (unix,win98,winXP,macOSX) and I dropped back to
hand-written config/make -- and now that it is done, there is not much
incentive anymore to do otherwise :-)