Re: checking for non-standard headers

[Guido Draheim]

Braden McDaniel wrote:
> Quoting Larry Siden <address@hidden>:
>
>
> > How can I get autoconf to automatically find header files that are not
> > part of the standard include path, but for which *.pc files exist?
>
>
> You don't need to do that; if the pkg-config metafile is on the system, the 
> assumption is that the package installation is intact. There's not much point 
> in trying to make broken installations work.

I'd like to agree - it's better to force users to install pkg-config
as a build-requirement, it's very very easy to do such as pkg-config
is a  standalone program written in plain and simple C. And if no
pkg-config then all its modules are not installed even when someone
did download-and-install-from-source some third-party packages
without pkg-config among them.

> > I want to check for non-standard headers, such as, pango/pango.h,
> > glib.h, and others.  AC_CHECK_HEADER seems to work only for standard
> > headers, i.e. headers that can be found in the standard include path.
> > How can I augment the include path for other headers?

The same way as it has been for the last years, via the fourth
argument of AC_CHECK_HEADER - do you develop new software with
ancient build tools like autoconf 2.13 ? That one did not have
it yet, and things had to use workarounds like assigning to
shell variables used in try-preprocess called by check-header.

> > I am calling "PKG_CHECK_MODULES(MODULES, pango glib-2.0)" to set
> > MODULES_CFLAGS, but don't know how to append this info to the include
> > path used by autoconf.
>
>
> Assuming you're using automake, you'll have something like this in your 
> Makefile.am:
>
>   AM_CFLAGS = @MODULES_CFLAGS@

consider adding in configure.ac as well:
   CFLAGS="$CFLAGS $MODULE_CFLAGS"

> ... since MODULES is what you called it when you invoked PKG_CHECK_MODULES. 
> You can call it anything you like. See pkg-config's man page for more 
> information.

cheers,
-- guido                                  http://AC-Archive.sf.net
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