Re: [Devel] Silly autoconf question

[David Turner]

Billy Biggs wrote:
> David Turner (address@hidden):
>
>
> > As far as I know, '/usr/include' is a hard-coded include path in GCC
> > and many other Unix compilers (to avoid typing it too often), so this
> > should word even if only '/usr/include/freetype2' is returned..
> > Actually, any "#include <header.h>" should work "out-of-the-box" when
> > the header file is in "/usr/include", or am I missing something ??
> >
> > In other words, this seems normal behaviour for '--cflags' to me.
>
>
>   It works fine for me, since debian's ft2build.h is in /usr/include.
> The problem is slackware which seems to have it as /usr/X11R6/include
> and does not return that in --cflags.  Also, the RH7.1 user which had it
> somewhere under .../include/freetype2
Are you sure that FreeType isn't present in Slackware in both
"/usr/X11R6" and "/usr" ?

What does "--cflags" or even "--prefix" return on this platform ?

Does "gcc `freetype-config --cflags` -c test.c" work on Slackware ?
If not, Slackware has a serious problem...

As for RedHat 7.1, I'm  really surprised and can't comment on it

>   I'm just wondering if the intention was for --cflags to include the
> path to ft2build.h, and if these distributions should fix their
> freetype-config scripts to reflect this.
The intention is _certainly_ not to include the standard include path
in the result of "--cflags". This avoids adding many superfluous
"-I/usr/include" to Makefiles, and this behaviour is shared by all
the packages that I know of that provide a similar configuration
script, or are detected through pkgconfig.

Note that if you do install FreeType in a non standard location
(for example by doing "configure --prefix=$HOME/local"), then
the resulting "freetype-config" will return the following for
"--cflags":

  -I$HOME/local -I$HOME/local/freetype2

since both paths are needed to properly compile a program with
this installation of the library.

So "freetype-config" does know about standard include paths and
intentionally removes them from --cflags..

Hope this helps,

- David Turner
- The FreeType Project  (www.freetype.org)