testsuite, failures galore

[Daniel Fischer]

On Tuesday 31 May 2011 14:44:58, Simon Marlow wrote:
> 
> What you need is libbfd.so, which is a symbolic link to the versioned
> library (libbfd-2.20.0.20100122-6.so).  This is normally installed by
> the development version of the library (e.g. libbfd-dev on
> Debian-derived distros).

Couldn't find anything like that for openSuSE (11.3), the versioned .so 
comes with binutils, libbfd.a (and .la) come from binutils-devel.

I'll take a look at the AC stuff and if I don't see how it might work, I'll 
try with a manually created symlink.

> 
> The shared version has the dependency built-in, so the GHC build system
> wouldn't have to do anything (that's how it works here).
> 
> > I'm far from an expert, but as far as I can see, there is already such
> > a test, in configure.ac:
> > 
> > AC_CHECK_LIB(bfd,    bfd_init)
> 
> I think that only tests for the presence of the symbol in the library,
> it doesn't test that compiling an executable against that library
> actually works.
> 

Well, compiling and running a simple test programme that calls bfd_init() 
works here without linking in libz, so I guess that test wouldn't detect 
the dependency even if it actually runs the executable.

> > with a test using bfd_init in configure. Unfortunately, that doesn't
> > detect if libz is needed without using some functions depending on
> > it. If I had the slightest idea how to make it detect the dependency
> > on libz, I happily would, but I've not yet found any introduction to
> > shell scripting or using autotools accessible to a complete beginner.
> 
> Yes, I'm afraid the learning curve is a bit steep.  It's so hard to get
> right that I wouldn't even attempt to try to fix it without a machine to
> test on!  A good place to start would be tests that do similar things -
> a quick look at the code suggests AC_COMPILE_IFFELSE and AC_LINK_IFFELSE
> might be useful, also FP_CHECK_FUNC looks like it might do what you
> want.

I'll look.

Cheers,
Daniel