Re: checking for libraries that link but do not run

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Mon, 5 Oct 2009, Ben Pfaff wrote:
> I'm not sure what "be prepared for dealing with the pitfalls"
> amounts to.  Can you point to an example of a correct way to deal
> with the pitfalls?  What does your package do to deal with them?

The unfortunate solution is to do huge amount of configure script 
testing and analyze the possible library dependencies and how to 
become aware of them.  Library order is often important.  Recent Linux 
makes things much easier due good support for implicit shared library 
dependencies but this just makes it more likely that your configure 
script will only work properly on Linux and only if shared libraries 
are installed.  It becomes necessary to test configure on other OSs 
without the implicit dependency support.

And then there are the OSs that don't run an executable before it has 
been formally blessed, or won't run a binary executable from a network 
share, run afoul of a virus checker, or where the mount options fail 
to allow execution.

> Gnulib uses AC_RUN_IFELSE in many places.  I suspect that most
> programs that use Gnulib will fall afoul of these problems too.

It seems unlikely that Gnulib is dependent on very many other 
libraries.  Once your program/library becomes dependent on over 60 
other libraries then you will know that you have arrived.

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/