Re: Unhelpful behaviour on Cygwin when "file" isn't installed

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hi Olly,

* Olly Betts wrote on Tue, Feb 14, 2006 at 08:06:52PM CET:
> I tried to search for previous references to this issue, but it's pretty much
> impossible to usefully search for "file"!  Sorry if this is rehashing old
> discussions.

It's not really, but there is a very similar bug report and patch
outstanding (which I temporarily forgot about):
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=9231830&forum_id=5119

Probably the issue can be solved to not use `file' at all, but I'd still
need to think about that.

> A user reported a problem trying to build my libtool-ed project on cygwin.
> The problem turned out to be that cygwin apparently doesn't install the
> "file" utility by default, but libtool tries to use it without checking
> if it is available (in func_win32_libid it seems).  I'm using libtool 1.5.22.
> Here's the output in question:
*snip*

> If "file" isn't available on cygwin by default, I feel it would be better to
> say so rather than to say that a (probably valid) library failed the file 
> magic
> test...

Yes.

> Also, I have AC_DISABLE_STATIC in configure.ac, so I'm slightly suprised that
> libtool falls back to building a static library here.  Is that supposed to
> happen?

Yes, I think that is by design: if libtool doesn't know how to build a
shared lib, it should fall back to what it knows instead.  At least that
seems to me one common reasoning in some libtool constructs.

Cheers,
Ralf