On Thursday 06 November 2014 14:10:50 Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
On Thu, Nov 06, 2014 at 01:34:24PM +0100, Pino Toscano wrote:
Given that three AC_CHECK_LIB checking for ncurses are now gone, wouldn't it better to explicitly search for it prior to searching for readline?
According to https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=499837 readline can be linked against either ncurses or termcap.
No modern system would prefer termcap, and I'll assume any system ancient/strange enough to only provide termcap and not ncurses would not be able to run libguestfs.
In Fedora, the readline-devel package requires ncurses-devel, so if our test for readline succeeds, we can assume ncurses-devel is installed and '-lreadline -lncurses' will just work.
On Debian/Ubuntu, they've ditched the nonsense of allowing alternate backend implementations, and they link readline to ncurses properly (so on Debian, '-lreadline' on its own works, whereas on Fedora we still need '-lreadline -lncurses' for no useful reason).
It would be nice if readline itself shipped with a pkgconfig file, or even any useful documentation on linking. It does neither.
So .. I think I'll leave this alone.
Makes sense then, thanks for the explanation. -- Pino Toscano