Re: trunk r115472: Make 'configure' work out-of-the-box on Solaris.

[martin rudalics]

>> Since my Debian package manager refuses to orderly install the tiff
>> libraries
>
> If we could go back to the actual issue.

Sorry for usurping this thread.

> I don't understand your statement here.
>
> apt-get install libtiff5-dev
>
> works fine for me. (It may be libtiff4-dev depending on which version of
> Debian you are using, or even libtiff-dev perhaps.) This is one of the
> things that `apt-get build-dep emacs24', as suggested in INSTALL, will
> do for you.

It works for me now as well.  But it did not work a couple of months ago
when I tried for the first time with Synaptic (IIRC it didn't offer me
libtiff5-dev back then but my memory may fail).  I also tried `apt-get
build-dep emacs24' then but it didn't enlighten me much.  So I retrieved
most information about which libraries to install from information I
found on the Web.

Probably the fact that on most installations the necessary libraries are
already present means that people usually don't have to bother about
installing them.  Resolving library dependencies manually might be a
demanding experiment for an inexperienced user like me.  My primary aim
was to simply not break my installation (something which caused me to
abandon working on GNU/Linux in younger days).

Also the note in INSTALL saying that

  Emacs will configure itself to build with these libraries if the
  `configure' script finds them on your system, unless you supply the
  appropriate --without-LIB option.

is misleading IMHO since it implies that Emacs will not stop with an
error if it does not find one of these libraries.

> And if you don't have root, just grab libtiff and install it yourself
> somewhere.
>
> (Having said all that, personally I would not class libtiff as
> "essential" for Emacs, but that point was made 6 years ago too.)

Personally, I don't know and never used TIFF.  So why should I bother?
Though maybe that building with TIFF works now also allows me to build
with Open Motif support which did not work so far ...

martin