Re: gnustep-make experiment

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 12 Feb 2007, at 15:51, Nicola Pero wrote:

> > >  * How we decide if we have to run ldconfig or not ?  Do we need to
> > > run it only on GNU/Linux ?  Are there similar tools on other
> > > unixes ? (I imagine so, so we'll have a general-purpose post-
> > > library-install target-dependent command that we run automatically)
> >
> > I'm pretty sure even libtool doesn't do that.  It prints out a big
> > warning about having to add the paths to your ld.conf yourself.
>
> Yes
>
>
> > I'd feel uncomfortable having something automatically mess with a  
> > system
> > file that could potential make the system unusable (however  
> > remotely).
>
> That's a good point - yes, ldconfig might generate issues. ;-)
>
> I suppose the right thing to do is printing a warning too then! ;-)
>
> Do we print it only on Linux ?

I agree that the point about not messing with system files is  
good ... but I never meant that we should do that without asking.
What I really had in mind was something like this ...

1. determine what system we are installing on and do something  
specific to the system type as below.

2. check to see if we need to add a path to /etc/ld.so.conf,  If we  
do, print out a message explaining and ask the user if they want us  
to add the path for them.
If they say yes, explain that we will try using sudo/su and they will  
need to enter a password ...

3. Check to see if we need to rerun /sbin/ldconfig, If we do, print  
out a message to explain and ask the user if they want us to do it.
If they say yes, run it if it's s-bit set, otherwise go through the  
su/sudo thing again ...

Obviously stages 2 and 3 would vary from system to system and we  
don't have to implement everything at once ... on a system where we  
don't know what to do, we could just print out a message explaining  
the issue and telling the user they need to sort things out and we  
would appreciate contribution of code to do it automatically.