Re: Midnight Commander on Solaris 7

[Pavel Roskin <proski gnu org>]

Hello, Peter!

> The first problem was that I didn't have glib installed. That's probably
> what defeated me last time. Now I knew enough to go to sunfreeware.com and
> download a copy. Then I had to install that... Next, there were still
> compile problems, this time due to glib not being in LD_LIBRARY_PATH. So I
> had to track down where it was installed and work out what the
> LD_LIBRARY_PATH entry should be (/usr/local/lib, in my case). For me, this
> was not a trivial process!!!

I think the best solution for you was actually to compile glib statically 
(i.e. with --disable-shared) to avoid all those problems.

It's not a problem with glib.  It's a very generic problem that libtool 
tries to solve.  Most people should prefer shared libraries, but in some 
cases (like yours) they are not worth the trouble.

Libtool-enabled libraries compile by default both as shared and static
libraries.  However, if things go wrong with shared libraries (which is
not unlikely on many systems because of to security consideretions)  
there is no fallback to the static libraries.

You may want to continue this discussion in libtool gnu org   There is
nothing mc-specific here, although many people have this problem with mc
because it's one of the first programs they want to compile themselves.

I would gladly use libtool in MC if it could help, but it won't (as far as
I know).  Another solution would be pkgconfig (it's required for
glib-1.3.x and above), but unlike libtool it's a binary that needs to be
installed, i.e. it cannot be integrated into the package.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin