Re: handling of missing AR

[Tim Mooney]

In regard to: Re: handling of missing AR, Ralf Wildenhues said (at 9:33pm...:

> Hi Brian,
>
> * Brian Gough wrote on Wed, Mar 29, 2006 at 09:11:54PM CEST:
> > 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'.
>
> Erm.  The user did not have /usr/ccs/bin in $PATH?
> I've never heard about a Solaris where ar was not installed.

Considering Solaris 10 does away with archive libraries, it wouldn't
be a big surprise if some future release doesn't include "ar" by default
(though it probably has to be available as an install option for standards 
conformance).  On my Solaris 10 system, ar is installed in /usr/ccs/bin/ar
(from SUNWbtool) and /usr/xpg4/bin/ar (from SUNWxcu4).

> >   checking for ar... false
> >   checking for ranlib... :
> >   checking for strip... :
> >
> > And the build then fails later (as expected) on the first use of 'ar'
>
> > 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.
>
> Well yes, but sometimes ar is not needed, for example it /may/ not be
> needed when --disable-static is given.

But if --disable-static is *not* given, shouldn't it be required?  Shouldn't
libtool's portion of configure fail in that case?

Tim
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