Re: depending projects

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Fri, 2004-05-14 at 10:31, Nathaniel wrote:
> Hi autoconf folks,
> 
> I have a "politics" question about autoconf-managed projects.
> 
> Our team has developped a library (let's call it libN) and several
> applications. Each application depends on this library libN. 
> 
> The libN is being installed on very different architectures and needs
> sometimes very sensitive tuning (i.e. lots of environment variables
> set and options passed to 'configure' script, such as more libraries
> to link with etc). Most often, the applications need the same options
> + the libN path. What we would like to do is to keep the libN
> installation information somewhere and be able to get it while an
> application is being 'configure'd. Thus, the user gets mad only once,
> when installing libN, and then for the application he has only
> "./configure; make; make install" to type in... 
> 
> Is there a common way to do that?
There exist several ways.

The traditional autoconf way would be to implement an aclocal macro
filled with checks for libN's presence and configuration.

Another possibility would be to add pkgconfig support to libN which your
application configure script could use then.

I'd recommend the latter approach. 

Ralf