[xmlsec] Success Building xmlsec on OS X

[Aleksey Sanin]

> 1. A philosophical, theoretical question: why doesn't dynamic linking 
> work with xmlsec under OS X? This is not an urgent issue. I will be 
> investigating it, and Wojtek tells me that at the end of the month he 
> will have access to an OS X system and will do some poking around. (The 
> essence of the problem is that xmlsec tries to load a .so file instead 
> of a .dylib file.) 
This is controlled by LTDL_SHLIB_EXT define in "ltdl" source code
that xmlsec uses. The theory is that this define should be set correctly
from ./configure.in script by special ltdl macros. I can imagine 
that it does not work because of one or more of the following:
 - There is an error in the ltdl macro and OS X is not recognized correctly.
 - You have an old version of aclocal macros installed.
 - xmlsec uses an old version of ltdl.
I recall that I've tested xmlsec on something like Mac OS 10.2 and 
everything was fine.

> 2. A practical question: what to do so that other OS X users can 
> download and build xmlsec with a minimum of pain? This strikes me as a 
> higher-priority issue. There is a range of possibilities here: 
> 
> a. Call the archived version of this message documentation, and let OS 
> X users search the archives to find out how to build. 
> b. Add a note to the installation instructions telling users to turn 
> off dynamic loading for OS X. 
> c. Make the default be to disable dynamic loading. Aleksey tells me 
> there is really only one user who needs it. 
> d. Leave the default as it is, but customize the configure scripts to 
> turn it off for OS X. 

I disagree with these options. It smells to me like a problem either 
with xmlsec configuration scripts or with your environment. I would suggest to 
find out what is the problem and fix it rather than just ignoring it.

Aleksey