Re: AR reset in libs.am

[Andy Helten]

I am no expert in this area either, but VxWorks provides an 'ar' for each 
platform
it supports (i.e. arppc for PowerPC), so I have to believe there are potential
differences.  I am currently using AC_PATH_PROG to set AR to arppc.  It is just 
a
little disturbing to see this undone by automake.  I tried your suggestion of
putting 'address@hidden@' into the Makefile.am and that works.  I was trying to 
keep my
Makefile.am files as simple as possible so this is not my first choice, 
however, it
sounds like I may not have a choice.

By the way, Solaris doesn't provide an 'ar' executable in most user's normal 
path,
for example, in /usr/ccs/bin.  So of course, 'AR=ar' results in make failures
because 'ar' is not found (that's how a co-worker discovered this problem).

Andy


Alexandre Duret-Lutz wrote:

> >>> "Andy" == Andy Helten <address@hidden> writes:
>
>  Andy> Hello,
>  Andy> I cross compile for VxWorks, so I set AR in my configure.ac based on 
> the
>  Andy> CPU type, however automake resets AR in each Makefile.in.  The culprit
>  Andy> is libs.am which contains a line 'AR = ar'.  I could be using something
>  Andy> incorrectly that ends up pulling libs.am into my Makefiles, however I
>  Andy> still think libs.am should be smarter about setting AR.  In other 
> words,
>  Andy> libs.am should not set AR if it is already set.  Agree?
>
> Is the ar for VxWorks special?  I've been crosscompiling a few
> Automake projects (containing convenient librairies, hence using
> $(AR)) for MingW and PalmOS, but the AR = ar setting never
> interfere.
>
> I believe that `ar' can treat the object files as binaries, only
> `ranlib' needs to know the object format and has to be
> $host-specific (but that just my impression and it may be wrong,
> I've no deep knowledge of this area).  Maybe this is the reason
> why Autoconf defines AC_PROG_RANLIB but not AC_PROG_AR.
>
> Anyway, you can override the `AR = ar' setting from your
> Makefile.am by adding the following line:
>   AM = @AM@
>
> This is likely to happen automatically when Automake starts to
> use Autoconf's --trace.
>
> [...]
> --
> Alexandre Duret-Lutz