On Thu, 24 Jan 2019, Sébastien Hinderer wrote:
I assume it's good to also provide three options for each library: one to let configure know whether it should be enabled or not, i.e. an equivalent of --with-x, and two options to specify the header and library directories. But, of course, it is not possible to define --foo-includes=DIR and --foo-libraries=DIR as is done for X, so is one supposed to use AC_ARG_VAR to achieve this?
Many configure scripts do such things but if such options are enabled by default then it harms the user by removing the freedom to specify the search order for headers and libraries, and possibly ordering in CFLAGS/CPPFLAGS. The reason why the freedom has been lost is that the ordering is then determined by code in the configure script.
It is not uncommon for a user who compiles a package from source code to have additional packages similarly pre-compiled/installed in different directories than used by the operating system and for the user to want to assure that preferred versions are used.
Bob -- Bob Friesenhahn bfriesen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/ GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/ Public Key, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/public-key.txt _______________________________________________ Autoconf mailing list Autoconf@xxxxxxx https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/autoconf
