The Makefiles, Mac OS X and ranlib

[Sven Panne]

Wolfgang Thaller wrote:
> As I've already remarked, I hate Makefiles and autoconf, [...]

Well, even though the commit logs seem to imply something different, these
are not my favourite pastime, either. :-] GNU make is extremely powerful,
but autoconf's choice of m4 as its language is horrible. Nevertheless, they
do a brilliant job and I haven't seen a convincing alternative yet.

> Can somebody make GHC's Makefiles invoke ranlib after installing a 
> library on Mac OS X?

The Makefiles look OK to me, I guess the problem is that configure decides
that ranlib is not needed, because your ar accepts the "s" option. So what
needs some tweaking is probably the FP_PROG_AR_NEEDS_RANLIB macro in the
top aclocal.m4. I'm reluctant to add a special case based on the platform,
could you write a few lines of shell code to test for "ranlib after cp"?
I could integrate this into aclocal.m4 then...

Cheers,
    S.