On 3/27/02 9:30 PM, "nobu.nokada / softhome.net" <nobu.nokada / softhome.net>
wrote:

>> Now comes the question for Ruby. Is it better to treat frameworks
>> explicitly, by adding have_framework, find_framework, etc to mkmf.rb and
>> asking the community to update their extconf.rb files? Or is it better to
>> just modify mkmf.rb so that, for example, if have_header can't find the
>> tcl.h in the specified places it looks in tcl.framework before returning
>> "no"?
> 
> I prefer the latter one.  It's just convention to search
> "include" and "lib" directories now, and if there is another
> convention in another platform, mkmf.rb should absorb the
> difference, I suppose.  Also it has some platform specific
> behaviors already.

Well, it *almost* works. I installed the Tk/Tcl 8.4 version for Quartz on
Mac X as a test. It only installs frameworks. There was still one dependency
in the extconf.rb, the assumption that all non-Windows platforms have X11.
Worse, it turns out that there is a partial Tcl 8.3 install on Mac X in the
traditional places by default. Apple must have put it there to support
something else. Apache? So the build finds the 8.4 headers and the 8.3 lib.

Still it's progress. Maybe it's to ambitious to think that mkmf.rb can be
honed to remove *all* system dependencies from extconf.rb files. The X11
assumption is a case in point.
-- 
Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves. -Abraham
Lincoln, 16th president of the U.S (1809-1865)