Re: specifying multiple with arguments

[Braden McDaniel]

On Tue, 2005-03-15 at 22:06 -0700, Patrick West wrote:
> The idea here is that we don't know what the other packages are. There
> isn't a set list of packages that can be used with our software. And
> we have not yet implemented dynamic loading of shared objects given
> some initialization file (that's next), so we wanted something in the
> interim to allow the user to specify this during configuration of our
> software.
> 
> So, what we want is --with-package=/some/path/to/package1 --with-
> package=/some/path/to/package2

Well, I don't think that particular syntax is going to work. But you
could employ a delimited list:

        ./configure --with-packages=package1,package2

> From this we can determine what modules, what libraries and what
> includes the user is wanting to use with our application without
> having to specify CPPFLAGS and LDFLAGS and LIBS.

I think you would do a disservice to your users by trying to supplant
the functionality of CPPFLAGS and LDFLAGS. Many users already know about
those; and those that don't will learn something they can use with other
autoconf-based (and some other) packages.

>  Our options is --with-package, not --with-<package> where <package>
> is the name of a user developed package of code that implements our
> API.
> 
> This is an interesting conversation, though, and I'm grateful for the
> input that you all are providing! I've learned a lot about autoconf.

pkg-config may help you--particularly if you have some say over the
configuration toolset used by your dependencies.

Please be more judicious in your quoting.

-- 
Braden McDaniel                           e-mail: <address@hidden>
<http://endoframe.com>                    Jabber: <address@hidden>