handling of missing AR

[Brian Gough]

Hello,

(Ralf, thanks for your previous email.)

I've had a libtool-related problem reported with a test release of GNU
GSL on a Solaris system with gcc & Sun ld, but missing 'ar'.

I am using libtool-1.5.22 autoconf-2.59 automake-1.9.6 for GSL.

The configure stage on this system gives (coming from AC_PROG_LIBTOOL),

  checking for ar... false
  checking for ranlib... :
  checking for strip... :

And the build then fails later (as expected) on the first use of 'ar'
with

  ....
  false cru .libs/libutils.a .libs/placeholder.o
  make[2]: *** [libutils.la] Error 1

The question was asked "Why doesn't configure stop with an error when
it finds ar is missing?"  I didn't have a good answer to that.  For
the average user the final error message is a hard to decipher.

Is there any reason I shouldn't put a test in the configure script to
bail out if ar is not found?---since I'm building static and shared
libraries it is always going to be needed I think.

Thanks for any insights,

-- 
Brian Gough
(GSL Maintainer)
http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/