#262: Check for required C libraries during configure
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Reporter: guest | Owner:
Type: enhancement | Status: new
Priority: normal | Milestone:
Component: Cabal library | Version: 1.2.3.0
Severity: normal | Resolution:
Keywords: | Difficulty: normal
Ghcversion: 6.8.2 | Platform:
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Comment (by duncan):
I don't think the dependency analysis tickets are relevant here. Just
knowing the required C headers and C libs and the include and library
search paths is enough information to do the checks. It's just the same
check that autoconf does and we can do it in a similar way.
I'm not sure that being able to specify the foreign package dependencies
would help here as we don't have a platform independent way of checking
for them anyway. Those are more hints for package managers I'd say.
So we should look up exactly how autoconf does these checks. My
understanding is:
* for headers it makes a small .c file that #includes the header and
calls gcc/cpp to process the file. It passes the extra include search dirs
with the -I flag.
* for libs it makes a small .o file and calls gcc/ld with the -l and -L
flags.
If they fail then it means we cannot find the header/lib in question.
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Ticket URL: <http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/262#comment:2>
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Hackage: Cabal and related projects