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Re: Announce: guile-dblib-0.9 available (beta software)



> > When I run dblib's configure script, does --enable-dblib=PATH tell
> > dblib where to install itself?  If so, why don't you use --prefix=PATH
> > instead?
> 
> I was trying to give the user an easy way to tell the configure script
> where to find the sybase headers and libraries.  I guess the normal
> way is to do stuff like this, which I found somewhat tedious and
> distasteful:
> 
>    export CPPFLAGS="/opt/sybase/include:${CPPFLAGS}"
>    export LDFLAGS="/opt/sybase/lib:${LDFLAGS}"
>    ./configure
> 
> You see, everthing inside Goldman has got it's own /opt directory, so
> it's impractical to have LDFLAGS and CPPFLAGS constantly set to the
> union of every software package you ever might want to use.

I agree, it's clumsy.

So, dblib is the name of your package, right?  And your package's
configuration script needs to be told (because it has no way of
guessing) where sybase is installed.

For starters, the configure script should guess the most common places
that the Sybase files are installed.  It should just check for the
presence of some distinctive header in a list of common directories.

Then, you should use a --with-sybase=PATH option; those are
designed specifically for cases like this.  Look in the autoconf
documentation for AC_ARG_WITH (look in the index under ARG_WITH).

> (I'm not ashamed to say that I don't understand the whole automake /
> autoconf / libtool suite.  My head nearly exploded the other night
> when I tried to learn them, and I still haven't tried to integrate
> automake).

If you just consider autoconf by itself, that's a good start.  It's
not so bad.

libtool is pretty independent of both of them.  Read the libtool
manual, and you'll be okay.

Automake makes my head explode too.  Which seems like a bad thing to
me.

> One question: a lot of times I've got guile-1.3 installed in
> /opt/guile, and I've got some snapshot installed in
> /home/mcmanr/local.  How does one specify that configure should use
> the guile in /home/mcmanr/local?  I guess I should just read
> guile.m4 and answer my own question.

I don't think there's currently a graceful answer to that.  You just
need to make sure guile.m4 finds the `guile-config' script in
/home/mcmanr/local.  Perhaps GTK (on which Guile's facility is
modeled) has a better solution.