Re: SUMMARY: Re: shared library -dev package naming proposal

[GOMBAS Gabor <gombasg@sztaki.hu>]

On Fri, Jul 29, 2005 at 12:06:38PM -0400, Jay Berkenbilt wrote:

> This is nice, but I think it's not really very autoconfish [tm] in
> spirit.

It is not meant to be autoconfish. It is meant to be run _before_
configure, so you can decide if you have to re-libtoolize the package or
not.

> Also, this invokes autoconf,
> which we don't necessarily want to do at package build time since this
> will cause packages to require a build dependency on autotools, a
> topic which has been discussed at length before.

I think I know what you miss: you think about checking the version of
the _installed_ libtool package. But that is completely uninteresting as
it will _not_ be used during the build. You want to know the libtool
version that was used for _generating_ the source package (or upstream
tarball). And if that version is wrong, then you have to re-run
libtoolize and autoconf anyway, so you do need to have autotools
installed.

If you do not want to build-depend on autotools then it is too late to
check the libtool version at build time (well, you can still check it
and generate an explicit FTBFS if it is wrong so forgetting to
re-libtoolize the package will be detected more easily).

Gabor

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     MTA SZTAKI Computer and Automation Research Institute
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