Re: Problem building with static pcre

Ian Silvester <[email protected]> wrote:

> So in the run-up to the 3.0.20 release I'm testing package builds,
> and am tripping over a test in the configure script when trying to
> build the binary with static pcre. Using the following invocation
> against a completely vanilla checkout of current (on my build machine
> that does have libpcre installed):

Can you clarify which pcre you are trying to statically
link against and why?

> My issue is that I don't understand autoconf syntax so despite my best 
> efforts to comprehend it I don't know what is being tested to check
> pcre.h usability. I've worked around this by using the
> --disable-dynamic-pcre configure option but it is a shame to have to
> force it - I'd be happier if I could understand why the test fails.
> 
> Thanks for any pointers,

My impression is that our autoconf mess has been written with the
assumptions that the best option is always dynamically linking to an
external pcre, that nobody would ever want to statically link to an
external pcre and that statically linking to the outdated internal pcre
should only be used as fallback if no piece of an external pcre can
be found and an external pcre can't be provided without a lot of pain.

The --disable-dynamic-pcre flag is poorly worded and really means
something like "statically link to the internal pcre no matter what
else is available".

To you and me statically linking to an external pcre might seem useful
for some platforms, but it's currently intentionally not supported
and --disable-dynamic-pcre by design is not supposed to help there.

I think it would be great if statically linking against an external
pcre was supported, but it probably involves a fair number of autoconf
changes and due to the risk of negatively affecting every platform it
should probably wait until the next stable release.

Fabian

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