Re: acinclude.m4 and wx detection question

On May 5, 2005, at 4:47 PM, Raphaël Enrici wrote:

> Hi Adam,
>
> I have a small question in mind I never asked concerning the way we
> check for wxwidgets files installed while in configure scripts (for
> example stc headers).
> Why don't we try to build small C or C++ examples which includes the
> required files and check to see if the build failed instead of
> hardcoding some test on file existance ? Or maybe we could parse the
> '-I' outputs of wx-confg --cflags or cxxflags to take as a base for
> the
> tests ?

We do use the wx-confg output for our basis:

WX_NEW_LDFLAGS=`${WX_CONFIG} --static --libs`

>
> IMHO we would gain in both portability (it would be easier to take
> care
> of specific configuration) and maintenance (no more change needed to
> acinclude.m4 if we change the version of wxwidgets we support).
>
> As an example, my wx-config outputs is this one:
>  wx-config --cflags
> -I/usr/lib/wx/include/gtk2-unicode-debug-static-2.6-pga3
> -I/usr/include/wx-2.6-pga3 -D__WXDEBUG__ -D__WXGTK__
> -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -D_LARGE_FILES -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE=1

Yes, but how would we go about finding the wx-config file in the
first place?

>
> If I want the configure script to pass with such a configuration, I
> must
> patch acinclude.m4 so that it refers to the correct path. If not, it
> just fails and tells me that I did not install stc which is not true.
>
> If we were trying to detect this with a small program like this:
> #include <wx/stc/stc.h>
> ...
> void main(void) { .... }

Again, you have to find wx-config.  The other problem is that wx
programs will fail if you don't link against the wx libraries.  Since
the wx library names are not reported by wx-config, we have to try
all the possible wx lib names (because they've changed to many times).

I'll take another look at this and see if we can't make some
improvements, but the acinclude.m4 has to be able to handle all the
one-offs, which usually requires a lot of manual checking, but we'll
see what we can do!

ahp