Re: Building prog first

[Ralf Wildenhues]

* Russell Shaw wrote on Sun, Mar 21, 2010 at 08:16:03AM CET:
> Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> >Furthermore, please don't hard-code absolute paths like
> >  /usr/share/unicode/UnicodeData.txt
> >
> >in your makefiles.  Make them configurable by configure.  Maybe your
> >users don't have root rights on their system but have the file installed
> >below their home somewhere?
> 
> Ok.
> I did: AC_CHECK_FILE([/usr/share/unicode/UnicodeData.txt], [], [])
> 
> In "configure", i get:
> 
>   if test "x$ac_cv_file__usr_share_unicode_UnicodeData_txt" = x""yes; then :
>   fi
> 
> Shouldn't this be:
> 
>   if test "x$ac_cv_file__usr_share_unicode_UnicodeData_txt" = "xyes"; then :
>   fi

First off, no, the two are completely equivalent.  This might not be
clear from a tutorial about shell quoting, but hey, shell quoting isn't
easy.

Then, AC_CHECK_FILE doesn't really help your user (and it kills cross
compilation, too).  If you really want to make this configurable, then
provide a switch or command line variables like
  --enable-unicode-file=location

and if that is not given, search for a few known places where this can
be.  For example, on this system, there exists a file with this name in
  /usr/share/perl/5.8.8/unicore

but I cannot tell you if it has the contents you might expect.

Cheers,
Ralf