Trying to be smarter than autotools

[ahmadia]

Looking at the code in autotools_package.py, I see explicit hardcoding with a hook function for rpath support on Linux.

In general, I would be more comfortable if our default behavior was to trust the build system (in this case, modern autotools should do a pretty good job of building the right thing on both Linux and OS X), instead of trying to be smarter than it. I'm really not interested in reinventing all the work that goes into autotools, CMake, etc...

Thoughts from others?

[dagss]

If you can find the flag to make autotools build libraries with RPATH linkage, then please go ahead and fix it.

[ahmadia]

It should be automatically added on systems where it's supported. I'm guessing this wasn't the case for you?

[dagss]

It has been the case at one point or another, though I haven't tried recently (and perhaps it depends on whether you pass --with-foo or whether the library is auto-detected, the flags basically allows auto-detection to pick it up without any --with-foo. E.g., HDF doesn't give an option for zlib, and so on.).

I suggest changing the default of the set_FLAGS (or whatever it was) to False, and then turn it on to true whenever it is needed.

[ahmadia]

okay, that seems like a reasonable compromise :)

I think we may also need to move the rpath function somewhere else, since
it's conceivable that other builder scripts may want/need access to it.

On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 12:21 PM, Dag Sverre Seljebotn <
[email protected]> wrote:

It has been the case at one point or another, though I haven't tried
recently (and perhaps it depends on whether you pass --with-foo or
whether the library is auto-detected, the flags basically allows
auto-detection to pick it up without any --with-foo. E.g., HDF doesn't
give an option for zlib, and so on.).

I suggest changing the default of the set_FLAGS (or whatever it was) to
False, and then turn it on to true whenever it is needed.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//issues/1#issuecomment-25904979
.

[dagss]

Yes, that was the intention, just never got around to it. There's support to specify hook_import_dirs or similar in the profiles, just set it to base (or create a new directory lib or something), and then all the hooks can import modules placed there.

[certik]

I don't think I ever managed to get rpath working with autotools without forcing it.