[tlbuild] asymptote build

[Philipp Stephani]

Karl Berry schrieb:
> ld accepts files names as an alternative to library names, so
> 
> Thanks for trying, but I'm afraid that kind of unportable solution 
> doesn't really help on the wide variety of systems asymptote runs on;
>  John couldn't apply it upstream.

I don't understand why this should be unportable, at least as long as
Linux is concerned.  ld looks for libX.so and libX.a when library X is
requested, so I cannot imagine that having it look for only libX.a is
unportable.  It took me a few minutes to read ld's man page and modify
configure.ac, and it compiled like a charm.  The same should hold for OS
X.  Windows doesn't seem to be supported by the GSL at all.

> In general, this is not a simple thing to do; for each library there
> has to be an option to link it statically.  Unfortunately, the simple
>  -static (or the equivalent) by itself doesn't work because linking
> libc statically causes problems.

That's right, I don't know why ld doesn't offer this.  Another
suggestion: Are there possibilities to build real setup packages in TeX
Live that could install shared libraries, too?  Or is it possible to
simply require shared versions of GSL and FFTW (which can be installed
by the package manager) if the user wants to install Asymptote?

> distributions (like Ubuntu) package ancient versions like 1.43.
> 
> I surmise that your getting involved with the Debian and Fedora 
> maintainers of their respective asymptote packages would have a
> bigger effect than anything we can do here.  They don't have the
> binary distribution problems that we do, and should be able to easily
> integrate OpenGL.  If they (and thus all their downstream distros)
> start shipping current asymptote in their current release, that will
> benefit many people.

Asymptote and TeX Live are special cases because they are updated so
frequently.  In fact, these two are the only packages which are
available via the package manager, and which I nonetheless install by
hand.  Any version of Asymptote or TeX Live in the distributions will be
outdated within a few days.  That's why I'm using TeX Live 2008 after all.

The reason why I'm so concerned about this is that TeX Live could really
help Asymptote gain lots of new users just because they don't have to
compile the code themselves.  Most new Linux and OS X users don't have
the prerequisites and capabilities to build Asymptote from scratch.  So
having an Asymptote without GSL, FFTW, or OpenGL would effectively
remove these features from Asymptote altogether.  For example, I
couldn't simply say, "here is a graph of the sinc function:
draw(graph(sinc, -5, 5))" because that wouldn't work for the users that
installed Asymptote out of TeX Live.