Re: Guile support in GNU make

On Sat, 2012-01-14 at 22:49 +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> What does the configure script probe to detect the availability of
> Guile?

I believe that Guile uses pkg-config.  I'm on the fence about this in
general but that's how they distribute it.  I'm willing to add specific
tests to the configure.in script, rather than relying on pkg-config, if
that seems preferred.

> AFAIU, that assumes a static link against the Guile library.  There's
> also a possibility of loading it dynamically at run time, if it is
> available.  It may even be better, since end users don't need to
> install Guile if they don't use the related features.

As it stands today, Guile is not optional at runtime.  I have some work
to do to allow completely abstracted extension modules (not a lot, just
a little) which I'm doing afterward.  Once that happens, it could be
possible to enhance Guile support in this way.  I'll keep this in mind.

However, it would really only be useful to people shipping binary
versions of make: to build from source you'd still need the Guile
development package installed if you wanted Guile support.  It would,
though, enable packagers to ship GNU make binary packages with Guile
enabled, but without depending on the Guile library packages.

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