Re: [gs-devel] ghostscript-8.13rc1 build feedback

[Ralph Giles]

On Fri, Dec 26, 2003 at 10:59:21AM +0100, Werner LEMBERG wrote:

> > Several of the builds of ghostscript-8.13rc1 were successful, but
> > a few problems remain:
> > 
> > (1) -I$(prefix)/include is needed in CFLAGS to avoid getting
> >      obsolete vendor-provided JPEG header files
> > (2) -L$(prefix)/lib is needed in LIBS to avoid getting obsolete
> >      vendor-provided JPEG libraries
> > 
> > It should not be necessary for the user to provide these: a typical
> > Unix system with have stable vendor-provided software in /usr, and
> > more-recent locally-installed software in $(prefix) (e.g.,
> > /usr/local).  Software installed in the $(prefix) tree should be
> > built by default with header files and libraries from that tree.

It's my experience that while a number of people are asking for configure to 
add the prefix to the 
search paths, but there's no particular concensus that it's a good idea. I can 
see the 
convenience, but I've always been happy with the env variable work-around. If 
you're installing 
that much stuff in an odd location, can't you just configure your system to 
look there by default?

> I believe that autoconf doesn't follow this strategy.  I had a similar
> problem with emacs which I install in the /usr/local/.  While the gcc
> compiler on my GNU/Linux box searches /usr/local/include by default
> before /usr/include, the linker doesn't search /usr/local/lib before
> /usr/lib, and there is no possibility (AFAIK) to force that with
> environment variables.  Consequently, I always have to add
> LDFLAGS=-L/usr/local/lib so that newer versions (in /usr/local/lib) of
> some libraries are used.  I wonder whether autoconf can/will implement
> your suggestion.

No, autoconf doesn't implement this automagically; the configure script would 
have to add the 
flags explicitly.

The typicial solution on Linux is to add /usr/local/lib to /etc/ld.so.conf. 
This also removes the 
requirement to compile in the library paths at build time if you don't want to 
muck with 
LD_LIBRARY_PATH, which some packages don't bother to do. Why /usr/local is in 
the default include 
path but not the default lib path on Linux I've never understood.

 -r