[csw-maintainers] Should X11 headers from Sun be remove from the farm ?

[Peter FELECAN]

William Bonnet <william at wbonnet.net> writes:

>> If there are hard-coded paths please patch the sources to obtain a build
>> without dependencies toward SUN provided headers and/or libraries.
>>   
> In a perfect world you are right. Unfortunatly some program do have
> too much things to fix (Firefox to give only example).  Autotools
> stuff are adding include and link path to Sun's X11 (both -L and -R)
> even if i patch .in files... thus i have to repatch after configure
> step :( That's pretty painful... so i was wondering if the simpliest
> solution was not to remove Sun devel packages.

This is something that we need to do sometimes even though painful and
doesn't represent a sufficient reason to alter the build stack
radically. Also, writing autoconf macros et al to adapt to our
environment would be nicer and more reliable. This is, IMHO, the road to
follow.

> When a program is failing to compile (like FF 3.0.13), then it's ok
> and easy to fix it. But i'm worried about programs that compiles using
> both Sun's and OpenCSW headers and lib. Such a mix does not
> necessarily improve reliability of the binaries produced... and there
> are not always a simple way to detect such cases

The solution to this is to build the necessary tool(s) to detect this
kind of confusion, i.e. to detect that SUN's X11 libraries are used when
not necessary; one handy tool can be based on ldd...
-- 
Peter