Re: bsd building

[Ben Pfaff]

Jason Stover <address@hidden> writes:

> Building on OpenBSD is still a bit of a pain. The
> default make is not GNU make, so I had to install GNU
> make because the BSD make does not like $< somewhere
> in the makefile, 

I think we should fix this problem.  If you like, you can try to
track it down yourself, or you can file a bug report and I will
hunt it myself when I get some spare time (which will not happen
before the Oct. 17 deadline for NSDI '06).

> and I had to export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib so
> ./confifure would find gsl's shared libraries.  And on BSD,
> /usr/local/include is not automatically in my include path.
>
> This happens even with gnulib.

I actually think that this one is not our problem.  I think that
it is reasonable to expect that libraries are either installed
where we can find them by default or the user is able to point us
to them.

It would be great to add some advice on how to work around the
problem in the INSTALL file, though.

> I can deal with these annoyances. My question
> is: Should users be expected to deal with such problems?

Our Makefiles should be portable, because it is not difficult to
make them portable, and Automake does most of the work for us.
But libraries are more system dependent; they're not standardized
as well as POSIX make.

One problem, as I understand it, with making /usr/local
directories defaults is that some systems historically make
/usr/local world-writable, so that it becomes a security hole.  I
don't know if anyone still does that.

> I guess I'm asking for some general guidlines, if there are any.

I don't know of a good general rule.  Please, if you find some
useful guidelines, please pass them along.
-- 
"Unix... is not so much a product
 as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history
 of the hacker subculture."
--Neal Stephenson