[asterisk-dev] autoconf issues for FreeBSD

[Edwin Groothuis]

On Thu, Oct 05, 2006 at 03:34:02PM +0200, Tzafrir Cohen wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 05, 2006 at 04:09:29AM -0700, Luigi Rizzo wrote:
> 
> > The problem is that platform-specific _defaults_ should be provided
> > by the tool (which should aware of platform issues) not by the
> > asterisk or perl or gzip or ghostscript programmer (who cannot know
> > what's the default location of stuff on FreeBSD, Knoppix, Ubuntu,
> > RedHat, Fedora, DragonFly, minix, you-name-it).
> 
> Have you bothered providing those defaults? Has FreeBSD bothred
> providing those defaults?

Not trying to be a pain here, but is it up to the OS to remember
where files from installed software are to be included from?

Let me show you three examples of installed software which provides
this to the end-user, for use in configure scripts:

- PostgreSQL
	[~] edwin at k7>pg_config --includedir
	/usr/local/include

- SDL
	[~] edwin at k7>sdl11-config --cflags
	-I/usr/local/include/SDL11 -I/usr/local/include -D_REENTRANT

- GLIB
	[~] edwin at k7>gnome-config glib --cflags
	-I/usr/local/include/glib12

Of the three pieces of software, a. configure would have no idea
where it could find the include files unless it checked for several
well known locations which is very time consuming (all possible
mergers of the possible prefixes and possible subdirectories under
it) and b. configure has been given an easy way to find out about
specific cflags.

I can only applaud the effort people make to provide these -config
scripts with their libraries to make life of people who don't store
everything under /usr/include and /usr/lib easier.

Edwin
-- 
Edwin Groothuis      |            Personal website: http://www.mavetju.org
edwin at mavetju.org    |          Weblog: http://weblog.barnet.com.au/edwin/