[darcs-users] the problems with autoconf

[zooko]

On May 15, 2008, at 8:26 AM, Karel Gardas wrote:

>> 1.  The current darcs autoconf scripts are not reliable at figuring
>> out, at configure time, what is going to be available at compile
>> time.  For example, ./configure will tell me that libcurl is
>> available, with various features, and then at compile time I will get
>> compile time errors saying that libcurl is not available.
>
> Interesting. How such compile time errors look like?

A typical one is that ghc cannot link at build time to the libcurl  
that is installed (because it is the wrong sort of library for the  
ghc that is installed), although the configure script decided to do  
that because gcc was able to link to it at build-time (because the  
gcc that was installed was the kind that can handle that sort of  
library).

> I'm not sure, but my view of this is completely different. As far as I
> know ghc is using gcc for building final executable/library so gcc is
> required for darcs compilation. Please correct me if I'm wrong!  
> Thanks.

That's true on (at least some) unix systems, but on Windows ghc comes  
with its own internally-bundled copy of gcc and uses that exclusively.

> could you be so kind and post here what you have achieved so far? I
> think the most important is your m4 macro for haskell/curl/ssl test.
> Perhaps someone will spot the bug in your code or will be able to
> continue where you have ended.

I hope so!  Pekka Pessi has sent me a patch with macros to test using  
ghc to compile C code, but unfortunately I cannot test that patch today.

Thanks,

Zooko