Re: [libvirt] [PATCH 3/3] m4: Check for rl_completion_quote_character

On Mon, 2018-01-15 at 13:31 +0100, Michal Privoznik wrote: > > So, one way to solve this once and for all would be to: > > > > * try looking up readline through pkg-config. If that works, > > then we already know we're compiling against a recent > > readline version and everything will work; > > > > * if readline's pkg-config file is not available, try linking > > against it the old way. This will succeed on oldish versions > > like the one shipped with CentOS but fail because of missing > > functions on macOS. > > > > I could try cooking up something like the above, but I can never > > seem to get it right the first couple of times when m4 is involved, > > so in the interest of time - and not having to merge this patch you > > hate ;) - would you mind looking into it yourself instead? > > The reason I hate this patch is not because the patch itself looks ugly. > It's because we have to deal with the situation in the first place and > invest our time in resolving it. And what you're suggesting might sound > right but we'll end up with the same situation after all. I don't think that's the case. Right now we have to work around issues in macOS all the time because we're linking against the obsolete readline version included in the base system; if we implemented what I propose above, then we could just mandate that readline 6.0 or newer is required. macOS builds would then fail unless you install a recent readline using brew, but that's entirely acceptable, and we would have obtained a reasonable baseline to work against going forward. Plus it would allow us to get rid of some nasty hacks[1] on our CI as well :)