On 24 July 2015 at 20:13, Guillaume Marcais <guilla...@marcais.net> wrote: > I am improving/writing a C++ project (called MUMmer) which creates a shared > library with libtool. In the same project, I also create a SWIG binding to > access in Perl some of the functionality of this shared library. > > Libtool creates the shared library in a hidden directory: > > .libs/libumdmummer.so > > The SWIG compilation creates a couple a files, a perl module file and a > shared library: > > swig/perl5/mummer.pm > swig/perl5/.libs/mummer.so > > The problem comes in when when I write tests in Perl. I need to add > directories to the Perl lib path so that it finds the module and shared > library, like this: > > perl -I ./swig/perl5 -I ./swig/perl5/.libs test.pl > > Passing the path './swig/perl5/.libs' seems very hackish and not portable. > This path was not specified anywhere, libtools decided to hide files there > on its own, and it feels like I should not use these files directly.
I'd suggest not hard-coding the name of the shared library in the Perl code. It could be extracted from the *.la file. That would likely improve portability. I don't see any way to avoid looking in .libs. There are other ways to affect Perl's module search path: by setting the PERL5LIB environmental variable, or by adding directories to @INC when the Perl program is run. I have a similar problem at the moment on a project. It doesn't use SWIG, but XS. (I know nothing about SWIG.) You can see the code at http://svn.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/trunk/tp/Texinfo/Convert/XSParagraph/XSParagraph.pm?revision=6463&root=texinfo&view=markup . It uses the DynaLoader module to load a dynamic library file. See this recent discussion: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/automake/2015-06/msg00018.html and https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/automake/2015-07/msg00002.html. Apparently this is a road not very well travelled, so there is no "proper way to do it".
