Re: module gethostname

[Bruce Korb]

On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 9:34 AM, Paul Eggert <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 09/15/2010 08:41 AM, Sam Steingold wrote:
>> I have to reiterate my complaint that the gnulib dependencies mean that one 
>> has
>> to include (almost) the whole of gnulib if one includes (almost) any part 
>> thereof.
>
> I agree that gnulib has too many dependencies and [...]

Once upon a time, long ago and far away, I proposed a new
library, "libcompat" that more-or-less would make all target
platforms look pretty much identical.  Lo and behold, over the
past decade, gnulib has gradually grown up to provide all
that infrastructure.  The only problem with it is that gnulib is
glued in to each project adding truly remarkable amounts
of configure time overhead to each and every project that
depends upon its glue, and that would be true even with
minimal gnulib interdependency.

I do think it would be Really, Really Nice if there were a
gnulib.pc file one could test.  If it were not there, I could just
fail the configure of my package and forget the several
minutes of configuration overhead.  If there were some recent
gnulib feature I could not live without, then I might add that
one bell or whistle to my project and the configure process
might be extended by a fraction of a second.

So, let's start that discussion again:  let's make an installable
gnulib that basically does all the configure tests for the current
target and cover 99% of all configure runs.  If someone has
a strange configuration with extra libraries et al., then it ought
to be straight forward enough to have an alternate gnulib.pc
file installed in an alternate PATH setup.  I do not see an obvious
reason why the configure process should be so ridiculous.

Or is that just me? ;)