[racket-dev] Distributing C libraries

On 10/05/2011 03:25 PM, John Clements wrote:
>
> On Oct 5, 2011, at 9:45 AM, Neil Toronto wrote:
>
>> I've just pushed the new 'plot' library.
>>
>> Eli and I both forgot that the new 'plot' still needs the old libfit, and removed it along with libplplot. I just added libfit back (the sources are in "src/fit" now instead of "src/plot/fit") along with the proper configure, Makefile.in, and get-libs.rkt changes.
>
> Tangential question: it looks like your distribution philosophy here is to insist that users have a C compiler installed. Is this correct? So people without a compiler can't use the package? (I realize that if it's true of your package, it's almost certainly true of the earlier one, as well; I'm just curious, because my sound library has the same issue.)

That would be true if 'plot' were a PLaneT package that includes libfit. 
But libfit.so is compiled at the same time as the rest of Racket and 
distributed with the other binaries.

(Eli wants to get rid of it. So do I. You might have seen the recent 
commit I pushed that comments out check-= 'fit' tests that randomly 
fail. Out of about 50 executions they failed once for me, but DrDr seems 
more unlucky. *sigh*)

Neil T