Re: Building zsh/db/gdbm on MacOS Sequoia

["Daniel Shahaf" <d.s@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Oliver Kiddle wrote on Mon, 29 Jun 2026 11:22 +00:00:
> Bart Schaefer wrote:
>> On Fri, Jun 26, 2026 at 7:56 PM Mikael Magnusson <mikachu@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> >
>> > Yeah, the asymmetry is that pcre has pcre-config, and gdbm doesn't
>> > have that nor a pkgconfig file, so there's not really anything we
>> > could do short of find -name libgdbm.so /
>
> Not long ago, I came across a library that used find like that below
> /usr which had the effect of hanging the build on my system for a very
> very long time.
>
> I don't think using the package manager as in the suggested patch is a
> great idea either. There are way too many different ones. There can be
> more than one on particular systems: you might have gdbm from
> more than one of mac ports, conda, brew, pkgsrc, ravenports, etc
>
> Using pkg-config files or specific commands like pcre2-config is
> well established and it is clearer how to control which is used where
> there are multiple installations of the same library. The same goes for
> assigning specific values to variables like LDFLAGS to direct the build
> to needed libraries. We should be trying to make the configure script
> simpler.

FWIW, there's similar discussion about gdbm here:

https://github.com/orgs/Homebrew/discussions/6810 "No pc file for gdbm?"

The conclusion:

> You can always ask upstream [= gdbm] to include [a pkg-config `.pc` file].

If gdbm upstream shipped a .pc file, the problem of compiling and
linking against it would be solved once and for all.  In our case, we
could use PKG_CHECK_MODULES [1].  (I haven't checked what version of
autoconf this macro was added in, but I don't imagine that'll be
a problem.)  This would work on all platforms (not just darwin) and
package managers (not just macports).  It's even agnostic of build system:
if we were to switch away from autoconf one day, we wouldn't need to
reimplement anything, but only to use the new build system's pkg-config
integration.  (= to translate the PKG_CHECK_MODULES invocation into the
configuration language of the new build system]

[1] https://autotools.info/pkgconfig/pkg_check_modules.html

Separately, I've noticed patch replaces $LDFLAGS rather than prepend
to it, as it does with $CPPFLAGS.  That seems like it might be
unintentional?  Just pointing it out in case the patch is merged
after all.

Cheers,

Daniel