I seem to have hit a fundamental problem with the way AC_CONFIG_SUBDIRS that seems to make it most of the way to useless if you want to also use pkg-config. Basically, it runs the configure scripts in sub-directories after my main configure script has finished, which is useless because I want information from those subsidiary configure script to decide how to build my application. I'm using AC_CONFIG_SUBDIRS because as well as my application which I'm configuring directly, I also have a number of sub-directories which contain libraries that are required to build the application (some are actually external, others hope to be in the longer term). In order to use these libraries I will need to add compiler and linker flags to locate the library and the header files. It's the job of configure to collect this information so that it can write it into the Makefiles. This means that when configure (for the application) runs, the information for the sub-directories must already exist. If the libraries were installed on the system this is no problem - just use the PKG_CHECK_MODULES macro. The problem comes when I want to use the copy of the library that is in the same source tree as my application. I can easily set the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable so that pkg-config looks in the right place for the library. It will even know to prefer the uninstalled version of the library and use those paths not the final install paths (I'm assuming static linkage). The problem is that the pkg-config file won't exist to be used. Because the paths pkg-config file depend on the prefix used to install the library, and the libraries listed depend on the libs needed to build the library, almost all library writers write a .pc.in file, and use configure to create the pkg-config file from that, so that all the information from configure can be put in the pkg-config file. This means that I can't get the paths for the local copy of the library unless it has already been configured, and the local copy isn't configured until I have finished configuring this package. So all I want is a version of AC_CONFIG_SUBDIRS that runs the configure script when I ask it to (having worked out when the right time is), not when it chooses at the end of the script. Do I have to create this from scratch, or am I missing something obvious? There are various possible hacks, but all of them either make it impossible to do out-of-source-tree builds, or push the problem down to the Makefile instead. Richard Ash Audacity developer _______________________________________________ Autoconf mailing list Autoconf@xxxxxxx http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/autoconf
