PIC

[Matthew Knepley]

Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> writes:

>   Hmmm, why should you have a PIC test? Who cares if something
> has PIC or not? You only thing you care about is that you CAN
> do what you want to do with it? (In this case I think it is simply
> that you can build an executable using a shared library PLUS the
> given library you are testing.)
>
>    Barry
>
> configure is suppose to be "can I ...?" not "is something ...?"

  Because the "can I" is VERY erratic. I can build some shared libraries, but
cannot build others. I do not understand the difference between these libraries
at the moment, however I DO know that absence of the PIC option causes the error.
Furthermore, checking this option allows a precise error message rather than a
guess. Lastly, this is in the configure spirit I believe, because we often test
the "what" of things, like endianness or the size of void *.

    Matt
-- 
"Failure has a thousand explanations. Success doesn't need one" -- Sir Alec Guiness