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

[Michal Privoznik]

On 01/15/2018 12:30 PM, Andrea Bolognani wrote:
> On Mon, 2018-01-15 at 10:26 +0100, Andrea Bolognani wrote:
>> macOS has brew, though. I've kicked off a Travis build with this
>> commit[1] included, let's see whether configure picks up readline
>> installed from brew instead of the obsolete one available in the
>> base system.
> 
> Nope, it still picks up the one shipped with the OS :/
> 
>> If it does, then we can omit your patch and... Document the version
>> requirement somehow? If we used pkg-config to detect readline
>> availability, that would be easy. Alas, readline only introduced
>> pkg-config support relatively recently, so we can't do that.
> 
> 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 know. What are your thoughts?

Michal