Hi all, I'm trying to make a project that uses the GNU scientific library, and having trouble getting it to build comfortable on the Mac. The problem is the location of the GSL libraries. When building from source, they are put (appropriately, at least IMHO) in /usr/local/lib. Darwinports puts them in /opt/local/lib, which makes me cringe a little but i'll acquiesce it. The problem is that neither of these directories is part of the standard Mac OS X library search paths. Thus the AC_CHECK_LIB tests are failing because they cannot find the appropriate libraries. Of course, the user has the option of specifying LDFLAGS="/opt/local/lib" (or whatever) on their ./configure line, and then the configure script finishes. I am of the opinion (and correct me if I'm wrong) that unless the user jumped through special hoops when compiling/installing software, they should not have to jump through special hoops for other software to utilize that install. Arguably because of darwinports' choice of path, this might fall under the 'jumping through special hoops' category, but downloading the source and installing manually (w/o a --prefix) puts things in /usr/local/lib. On a system with GNU ld, I would have no problem telling my users that /usr/local/lib should be in their library search paths to compile my software. However I cannot seem to find a Mac OS X equivalent of /etc/ld.so.conf. I've come across DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH and of course LD_LIBRARY_PATH from google searches, but these don't even seem to work as I would expect: [DY]LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/opt/local/lib" ./configure still fails, and config.log shows a command line which doesn't even include these paths. If I go the LDFLAGS route, I still end up having the same issue with includes too. Now users must specify two paths by hand on the command line, for a library they might not even know exists! I feel like I should just be including a 'makefile' with some docs that say, "edit the first 10 lines to suit your system...". How have other people solved this? I'm finding it hard to accept that I must tell OS X users that a significant majority of them should be specifying environment variables on the ./configure line. I don't expect most people will even start scouring through the docs if they find it doesn't build right off. On the other hand, I don't know how to work around OS X's strange linker and unconfigurable default search paths. It seems very strange to me that the Mac folk would design it this way; could someone please point out what I'm missing? Any other thoughts / opinions / ideas / solutions / rants? -tom _______________________________________________ Autoconf mailing list Autoconf@xxxxxxx http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/autoconf
