Advice on the project structure for a library

[Jef Driesen]

I'm creating my first autoconf/automake project and need some advice on
the standard way to structure my project source code (if there is such a
thing). My project consist of a (libtool) library and a few example
applications that are using the library.

Right now my directory structure is as follows:

\          configure.ac, toplevel Makefile.am
\src       Makefile.am, *.h and *.c files for the library
\examples  Makefile.am, *.h and *.c files for the examples

I noticed it is common practice to install the public headers to 
$includedir/libfoo (rather than straight into $includedir), especially 
when the library has multiple public header files. So that's what I'm doing.

For applications depending on the library, I noticed there are two 
approaches in use:

CFLAGS=-I${includedir}
#include <libfoo/header.h>

or

CFLAGS=-I${includedir}/libfoo
#include <header.h>

I think the first one is preferable (but I might be wrong), because it 
makes it very clear from which library the header file is included. And 
there is also no possibility of conflicts with a header file of the same 
name from another package.

But how do structure my project to make this work? Everything I tried 
fails to build either the library or the examples, because of problems 
with finding the header files. For instance, if I use the 
<libfoo/header.h> style include in my project, it fails to build 
anything, because the header files are not installed yet and thus can't 
be found.