Re: [PATCH] version-etc: undefined reference to _version_etc_copyright

[Eric Blake]

On 09/21/2011 02:24 PM, Andrew Schulman wrote:
> In the current gnulib, when I extract and try to build argp and
> argp-version-etc, the build fails with
>
> .libs/version-etc.o: In function `version_etc_arn':
> /home/admin/dev/cygwin/libargp/libargp-20110921/gllib/version-etc.c:84:
> undefined reference to `_version_etc_copyright'
>
> The only module that provides the missing constant is version-etc-fsf, so it
> seems that version-etc should depend on version-etc-fsf.  The patch below
> fixes the problem.

Thanks for the patch, but I'm not sure if I want to apply it.  We have 
several modules that are intentionally missing dependencies (error is 
one that comes to mind, which intentionally omits a dependency on 
progname), where the idea is that making the dependency explicit pulls 
in too much for some users, and that the missing symbols can be easily 
supplied in an alternate manner rather than requiring use of the other 
gnulib module.

The idea here is that you should use version-etc-fsf if you want FSF 
copyrights, and if you don't want FSF copyrights, then use version-etc 
and provide your own version_etc_copyright() function that uses your 
copyrights.

That is, the dependency is in the reverse direction, and we don't want 
to make it circular.  Yes, you could also use './gnulib-tool 
--avoid=version-etc-fsf version-etc' as a means of breaking the 
dependency if it were present, instead of the current situation of 
version-etc needing external help, but I'm not sure if it is worth the 
change.

--
Eric Blake   address@hidden    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org