[Cmake] Problems finding programs on FreeBSD

[Richard Wackerbarth]

On Mar 19, 2004, at 7:48 AM, William A. Hoffman wrote:

> At 06:40 PM 3/18/2004, Richard Wackerbarth wrote:
>> I have two questions :
>>
>> (1) Which "make" should we find?
>
> The makefiles generated by cmake should work with either make or 
> gnumake.  If you
> find a case where that is not true, please report the bug.   
> Internally cmake for
> use in try-compile commands needs to use a make, and it looks for 
> gmake before make as
> gmake is often a better choice if it is around.   However, once the 
> makefiles are generated,
> then you can use make or gmake.

Since I don't know of any case where it is failing, we can leave this 
as-is until it causes a problem.

>> (2) Tcl has problems on "stock" FreeBSD installs.
>>
>>       FreeBSD has chosen to install tclsh under a name like "tclsh8.3"
>>       However, they also install a stub program under the name 
>> "tclsh" which does not
>>       actually run the tcl shell, but issued a warning informing the 
>> user where he might
>>       find the desired command.
>>
>>       Personally, I don't like that behavior and modify the install 
>> on my system so that "tclsh"
>>       is a link to the current version. But that is not "out of the 
>> box" (package install) behavior.
>>
>>       Would it be bad to test for the named versions "tclsh8.4", 
>> "tcl84", etc. first and check for
>>       "tclsh" last?  Or would it be better to actually run a trivial 
>> test program to see if the shell
>>      actually works?
>
> The FindTclsh.cmake file looks for the following:
>
>  NAMES tclsh
>   tclsh84 tclsh8.4
>   tclsh83 tclsh8.3
>   tclsh82 tclsh8.2
>   tclsh80 tclsh8.0
>
> I guess you are saying that tclsh should not be in the list, or at 
> least it
> should be the last choice.


>  It seems like a dumb idea of an OS to install a tclsh that does not 
> work simply to tell people to look for it in another place, but I 
> guess we can't change that.   On many other systems tclsh is a link to 
> the prefered tcl installed on the machine.
>
> -Bill

I agree that it is a dumb idea. However, I don't see any particular 
down-side to putting it last.
The versions that ARE listed should all be stable. We would grab the 
latest one that is installed.

Putting it last would be far simpler that actually building and running 
a test to make sure that tclsh actually runs.

But, we SHOULD do one of them. (Change the order OR run a test)