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Date: Tue, 19 Aug 1997 01:09:02 +0100
From: Ian Vaudrey <i.vaudrey@cableinet.co.uk>
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To: Satoshi Asami <asami@cs.berkeley.edu>
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Subject: Re: Is X installed?
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On 18 August 1997 16:02, Satoshi Asami wrote:
>  * Is there an approved method for a port to tell if X is installed
>  * on the target machine?
> 
> Depends on what you mean by "X is installed". :)
> 
> I'd probably test /usr/X11R6/lib/libX11.a or something.  But you need
> to tell us what you are trying to do.
> 
> Satoshi
> 

OK, here goes. The Cyrus port has some problems one of which is that as
it stands, while it does not need X to run, it will only build on a
machine with X installed since building requires makedepend.

Personally I can see no reason why I'd want to install a GUI on a mail
server that's locked in a machine room and that I manage via telnet,
just so that I can build Cyrus. The good folks at CMU must have
anticipated this sort of scenario as they include the makedepend sources
in the Cyrus tarball.

So, what I was thinking of doing is patching the port to check for the
presence of X/makedepend and if not found, build and install makedepend
from the sources included with Cyrus - I thought which -s makedepend
might be used for the test, but as I am still very much a newbie I
wanted to check that this was the way to go.

However, I've since decided that it might be better to have a separate
port for makedepend, the Cyrus port would then just require a
BUILD_DEPENDS line, I think. I have put together a port and it's at
<http://wkweb1.cableinet.co.uk/i.vaudrey/makedepend/makedepend.tgz> if
anyone wants to take a look at it. I'd really appreciate some feedback,
especially on it's potential usefulness or otherwise outside of Cyrus (I
posted a couple of days ago asking about this, no responses yet).

Have I gone in the right general direction?

 - Ian