development packages and multilib

[Ralf Corsepius]

Tom Lane wrote:
> Orcan Ogetbil <oget.fedora at gmail.com> writes:
>> On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 4:11 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
>>> Actually the only reason that mysql-config is a binary and not a script
>>> is that there doesn't seem to be any other good way for it to know which
>>> word-width it's supposed to return results for. This is one of the main
>>> problems with trying to do software builds in a multilib environment.
> 
>> What is wrong with renaming the xxxxx-config binary to
>> xxxxx-config.%{arch} (or moving it to %{_libdir}) and writing a
>> platform independent shell script xxxxx-config that will call the
>> correct xxxxx-config.%{arch} file?
> 
> How is the platform independent shell script to know which arch-specific
> file to call?  (This is an actual question, not a rhetorical one.)
> AFAIK there is nothing it can look at that isn't likely to do the Wrong
> Thing from the perspective of someone trying to build software.

To be able to do so, in a perfect world, such a shell script would have 
to receive and to process the CFLAGS being used in calls to gcc.
(c.f. -print-multi-directory, -print-multi-lib, 
-print-multi-os-directory in gcc --help).

Ralf