Re: [pcre-dev] libtool

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Author: H.Merijn Brand
Date:  
To: pcre-dev
Subject: Re: [pcre-dev] libtool
On Tue, 12 Jun 2012 09:37:41 +0100 (BST), Philip Hazel
<ph10@???> wrote:

> On Tue, 12 Jun 2012, Giuseppe D'Angelo wrote:
>
> > On 11 June 2012 15:51, H.Merijn Brand <h.m.brand@???> wrote:
> > > Will there be a version of the excellent pcre available that does NOT
> > > require the ultimate of shit: libtool?
> >
> > To be honest, it's not a mandatory dependency. You can build PCRE
> > "manually" following the instructions in the NON-UNIX-USE file (that's
> > what I did in Qt 5, and it is really trivial), or by using CMake.
>
> I wrote the NON-UNIX-USE instructions precisely so that those who did


I promise I will try that. For now, I might suggest to call
NON-UNIX-USE NON-LINUX-USE, as AIX and HP-UX *are* Unix and
- even when the auto* is installed, will most likely NOT work.

I port a lot of open-source to HP-UX, and - when I have to for
our customer support - also on AIX, which I will postpone as
long as possible.

There is no "INSTALL" document in the top-folder, nor a small
reference to how to build without autoshit in the README, so I
choose build_unix and run configure. If configure comes with
an option --disable-nls, I always choose so, as localisation
on AIX and HP-UX sucks. When pcre's configure would come with
an option --disable-libtool, if only to display a message on
what document to read to use the alternative path, that would
have scratched every itch.

I understand that you do not want to maintain a plethora of
build systems, and I applaud the fact that alternatives are
available, but at least to me, those alternatives are very
hard to find.

> not have, or did not want to use, the autotools stuff could still find
> a way to build PCRE.[*] The disadvantage is that if you write your own
> script to do it, you may have to maintain that script if a new file is
> added or there is an extension such as the recent addition of 16-bit
> support.
>
> CMake was added to PCRE mainly for Windows users, where the autotools
> have issues, but of course it can be used on Unix and other systems.
> So we do offer (and support) three different building approaches.
>
> Philip
>
> [*] The original PCRE just used a Makefile that I wrote, using
> "configure", but not automake.


That situation was close to perfect for me :)

> It got hard to maintain manually, and a PCRE user updated it to
> automake, which, I have to admit, for systems where libtool does work,
> makes life easier.


It is just such a shame that autotrouble only works on Linux (where it
indeed seems to work rather well). Its original intent was to make it
work everywhere, but as there are so little users to test on non-linux
systems, the general direction of autocrash and libtool just went into
the oposite direction completely ignoring developers on Unix.

-- 
H.Merijn Brand  http://tux.nl   Perl Monger  http://amsterdam.pm.org/
using perl5.00307 .. 5.14   porting perl5 on HP-UX, AIX, and openSUSE
http://mirrors.develooper.com/hpux/        http://www.test-smoke.org/
http://qa.perl.org   http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/stupid-disclaimers/