Re: Problem with tests for GSL

[Laurence Finston]

On Mon, 29 Oct 2007, Brian Dessent wrote:

> Laurence Finston wrote:
> 
> > However, I think the problem was that the
> > location of the library is not in the "system search path", which is why I
> > need the options I mentioned in my original posting.  I'm not the system
> > administrator on this machine and I can't do anything about changing this.
> > I haven't found any way of passing this information to Autoconf so it can
> > use these options when testing for the presence of the library and I
> > didn't find any discussion of this problem in the places I looked
> > before.
> 
> People have already pointed you at how to write a configure test that
> sets its own *FLAGS for the duration of the test.  But I'm confused, if
> your installation of GSL is in a strange place then why would you want
> to hard-code something like that into the package's configure.ac file? 

At present, I just want to get it to work on my system.  The next step 
would be to see if I could get it to work for a user who also has it in a 
strange place, but not the same one.  I would probably have to explain how 
to get this to work in the `README' and/or `INSTALL' file, e.g., what 
environment variables to set, or arguments to pass to `configure', as you 
explain below.  

> Shouldn't you instead just leave the configure test to use the standard
> autoconf variables and instead configure your package with:
> 
> path/to/configure --some-options \
>    CPPFLAGS="-I/my/custom/gsl/location/include" \
>    LDFLAGS="-L/my/custom/gsl/location/lib"

Thanks, this looks promising.  However, there's more than one program to 
be compiled and I'd rather not use these options where they're not needed.  
Not that they'd do any harm, of course, but for the sake of neatness.
 
> All of these *FLAGS are meant to be settable this way by the user when
> invoking configure if they have special needs, such as non-standard
> locations.  You don't need to modify any files to achieve that.

Thanks again.

Laurence