Re: Problems installing dependant libraries

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Sat, 13 Mar 2004, Albert Chin wrote:

> > The fundamental problem is that Automake does not have an overall
> > coherent understanding of the library dependencies when libraries are
> > built using a recursive build.  Without understanding the library
> > dependencies, it is difficult to see how relinking would work.
>
> Why not just have the developer write a Makefile.am so the libraries
> are built/installed in the correct order?

Wouldn't that be nice. :-)

Unfortunately, developers often do things wrong, and unless there is a
reported error, the problem remains undetected for a long time.  This
is a serious problem for projects which develop updates for libraries
which are already installed on the system.  The linker happily links
with older existing libraries on the system, and binary packages may
be shipped which depend on the wrong libraries.

I don't think that 'make distcheck' finds this kind of problem if the
libraries are already installed in a standard location in the system
since the linker will use the installed shared library.

In complex projects, it can be difficult to determine what order the
libraries should be installed in.

Currently developers are doing what you describe, but it would be
useful if Automake would observe the library dependencies that the
developer specified via LDADD in the Makefile.am files.  It partially
does this while building (it seems to work fine at the Makefile.am
level), but not at all while installing.  The build uses Makefile
dependencies, but the install just uses a simple loop.

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden
http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen