Re: [9fans] Re: configure misery

[Aharon Robbins <arnold@skeeve.com>]

In article <200311170042.hAH0gTnM028044@math.Princeton.EDU> you write:
>Gawk is an interesting test case.  I poked around a little in the
>FreeBSD port.  It doesn't just ./configure && make && make install.
>It has to pass two arguments to configure to tell it the location
>of libraries it wouldn't otherwise find.  More worryingly it has
>to patch both Makefile.in and configure.  In other words, some poor
>soul had to read and understand the ``object code'' generated by
>autoconf well enough to patch it.  In this case it appears that
>autoconf has shifted some work from the program author to the port
>maintainer.
>
> ...
>
>Note that gawk has far fewer dependencies than some other programs.
>In fact the only library it needs which is not part of the base system
>is the gettext library, which is the one autconf doesn't find.

That is surprising to me.  I haven't looked at FreeBSD, but this makes it
sound like they've put the library in some non-standard place, since the
machinery as distributed is supposed to be able to find it, AND, since
gawk ships with a copy of the gettext library, use the one in the source
distribution if it can't find one on the system.

So, this is a guess only, the FreeBSD people seem to have made this work
for themselves.

Arnold