On Thu, 6 Jul 2000, Steven G. Johnson wrote:
> I'd like to chime in with support for documenting a few key environment
> variables in --help.
>
> The single biggest problem I see users having when installing packages ala
> autoconf is that they installed a needed library in some random directory
> (e.g. if they are not root) and so of course configure doesn't find it. I
> see this again and again, both in my own programs and other people's, no
> matter how well I try to document it.
>
> Because of this, I think it is a good idea to document at least LDFLAGS
> ("-L/somedir/lib") and CPPFLAGS ("-I/somedir/include") in the --help,
> perhaps along with CC/CXX/F77 and CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS/FFLAGS. I wouldn't mind
> submitting a patch for that.
>
> Steven
How would you know what directory /somedir is? I could see that it
might make sense to check for ${prefix}/include and ${exec_prefix}/lib
and use those as a default if they exist (and perhaps if they are
not the "regular" default like /usr/local). That way if you have
three packages that want to install into /usr/mydir, and all three
use the same --prefix, then it will just work like magic. But
then again, you could just code that into your own configure.in.
Mo DeJong
Red Hat Inc
