So, in the last few weeks I’ve been filing bugs for packages that don’t respect CFLAGS (or CXXFLAGS) using the beacon trick. Beside causing some possibly false positives, the testing is going well.
The problem is that I found more than a couple of packages that either do call gcc manually (I admit I’m the author of a couple of ebuilds doing that) or where the patch to fix the Makefile would be more complex than just using a boilerplate makefile.
So what is the boilerplate makefile I talk about? Something like this:
$(TARGET): $(OBJS)
$(CC) $(LDFLAGS) -o $@ $^ $(LIBS)
Does it work? Yes it does, and it will respect CFLAGS, CXXFLAGS and LDFLAGS just fine, the invocation on an ebuild (taking one I modified earlier today) would be as easy as:
src_compile() {
emake CC="$(tc-getCC)"
TARGET="xsimpsons"
OBJS="xsimpsons.o toon.o"
LIBS="-lX11 -lXext -lXpm" || die "emake failed"
}
Now of course this would suck if you had to do it for every and each ebuild, but what if we were to simplify it to an eclass? Something like having an ebuild just invoking it this way:
ESIMPLE_TARGET="xsimpsons"
ESIMPLE_OBJS="xsimpsons.o toon.o"
ESIMPLE_LIBS="-lX11 -lXext -lXpm"
inherit esimple
For slightly more complicated things you could make it use PKG_CONFIG too…
ESIMPLE_TARGET="xsimpsons"
ESIMPLE_OBJS="xsimpsons.o toon.o"
ESIMPLE_REQUIRED="x11 xext xpm"
inherit esimple
so that it would call pkg-config for those rather than using the libraries directly (this would allow to simplify also picoxine’s ebuild for instance that uses xine-lib).
Even better (or maybe I’m getting over the top here ;)), one could make the eclass accept a possibly static USE flag that would call pkg-config --static instead of standard pkg-config and append -static to the LDFLAGS, so that the resulting binary would be, well, static…
If anybody has comments about this, to flesh it out before it could actually be proposed for an eclass, it would be a nice time to say here so we can start with the right foot!