Re: guile-2.0 on mingw: the sequel

[Mark H Weaver <mhw@netris.org>]

ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) writes:

> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> skribis:
>
>>> From: Mark H Weaver <mhw@netris.org>
>>> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>,  "guile-user\@gnu.org" <guile-user@gnu.org>
>>> Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2013 11:13:19 -0400
>>> 
>>> Of course, ideally we would allow the entire Guile install to be freely
>>> relocatable, as Windows users have come to expect.  This would require
>>> some help from a Windows developer.
>>
>> Why should this feature be limited to Windows builds of Guile?  Why
>> not make it work for Posix platforms as well?  Some other projects
>> already do, they use argv[0] and PATH search to find the place where
>> the executable is installed, and record relative file names from
>> there.
>
> This is not completely reliable when using argv[0] because argv[0] can
> be anything, though this can be work around on Linux-based systems with
> /proc/self/exe as done in
> <http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/gnu/packages/patches/guile-relocatable.patch>.

This finds the executable, but as I noted in a recent message, that
doesn't reliably lead to finding the location of libguile.  I think
you're assuming that the executable is the standard 'guile' executable,
or at least that it's installed in the same prefix as libguile.

> Here’s a proposal: add a --enable-relocatable configure option, have it
> default to yes on MinGW and Cygwin (assuming there’s a method that works
> reliably on these), and default to no elsewhere; alternately, have it
> default to no everywhere.
>
> WDYT?

In theory, I like this idea.  I just don't see how it can be made to
work reliably on POSIX systems.

    Thanks,
      Mark