6.15.00: `config.rpath' missing

[Maciej W. Rozycki]

On Wed, 27 Aug 2008, Christos Zoulas wrote:

> |  It comes with gettext.  Watch the spelling -- it's gettextize!  It's full
> | description is referred to from the main gettext info page in the "The
> | Maintainer's View" section.
> 
> What version of gettext? It is seems not to be in 0.14.4 which NetBSD currently

 It's been there at least since 0.10.35 which is the oldest version I have
ever dealt with.  I do not have older versions handy.  It looks like the
NetBSD installation is incomplete then.  Myself, I tend to build software
from sources, so I end up with whatever the respective maintainer of a
piece of software decided should be installed.

 Anyway, you can copy config.rpath manually.  If that is not installed
either, then you can extract it from a gettext source distribution.  
After all, it is merely a shell script -- no rocket science here.
I reckon this config.rpath script to be a fairly recent addition.

> has. Finally it seems wrong to me to depend on a particular iconv installation
> to grab autoconf features for it. This does not belong in gettext, but in

 This is an autoconf extension, so it cannot come with autoconf proper.  
You are right though that AM_ICONV should not depend on the
system-installed locale support and to the best of my knowledge that is
indeed the intent.  The user does not have to have gettext installed for
compilation to work.

 However the AM_ICONV implementation you have chosen actually comes with
gettext and I think its assumption for a software package maintainer to
have the rest of gettext installed too is not unreasonable.

> autoconf. How does solaris and other !linux OS's handle this?

 I have no access to such systems anymore, sorry.  However as I understand
the behaviour is essentially the same: if there is locale support
installed in the system and its functionality is good enough as determined
by the autoconf macro, then it is used, otherwise the library bundled with
the software package is built and used instead (unless --disable-nls is
specified).

 As I understand config.rpath is used to handle the case where a 
non-standard system-installed locale support library is in a place, such 
as /usr/local/lib, where it is not normally searched by the run-time 
loader; in this case a system-specific flag is passed through to the 
static loader so as to add the necessary library search path to the 
binary being linked against the library.  The purpose of the script is to 
produce the flag needed.

 Please note that while I have some experience with some pieces of 
software I do not claim authority on gettext -- please consider discussing 
any concerns with gettext maintainers at <bug-gnu-gettext at gnu.org>.  Feel 
free to cc me if you believe I might provide any insight.

  Maciej