On Wed, 15 Nov 2000, Kurt Hornik wrote:
> Several add-on packages (e.g., most DBMS ones, XML, ...) come with a
> configure script which tries to find headers and libraries required by
> the package. I was wondering whether we could/should standardize how
> this is done.
IMO the main problem is that header files and libraries are not in
/usr/include or /usr/lib but, for example, for mysql in
/usr/local/mysql/{include,lib} by default. A package should build without
interaction if headers and libs are in their default place.
>
> In what follows, suppose package FOO needs functionality BAR.
>
> * One approach would be via command-line arguments to configure. There
> seems to be no standard for this. GNOME uses
>
> --with-FOO-prefix
> --with-FOO-exec-prefix
>
> in several of its components. However, this, assumes that the GNU
> standards are followed in the sense that headers go into
>
> FOO-prefix/include
>
> and libs go into
>
> FOO-exec-prefix/lib
>
> which might not necessarily be the case.
>
> Alternatively, we could have
>
> --with-FOO-libraries
> --with-FOO-libs
>
> and
>
> --with-FOO-includes
> --with-FOO-headers
>
> (one of each only, of course).
Can one define default values here?
>
> * The other possibility would be via environment variables, such as
> CPPFLAGS and LIBS or maybe FOO_CPPFLAGS and FOO_LIBS. (E.g., for
> package XML we would use LIBXML_CPPFLAGS and LIBXML_LIBS.)
>
> I think the simplest solution would be via CPPFLAGS and LIBS because it
> is not package-specific. So installation would happen via
>
> CPPFLAGS=... LIBS=... R CMD INSTALL /path/to/pkg.tar.gz
Maybe it is possible to check if CPPFLAGS is empty (replace it with a
default value) or not (try to build the package and give an error message
if it failed, pointing to the appropriate environment variable)?
>
> (did not check if this works now).
>
> Now I did not check all packages, so is there something I may be
> overlooking?
>
> (Once we agree on a standard, I would like to document it in R-exts.)
>
> -k
>
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