[Xastir] geotiff includes on Ubuntu 8.03

[Tom Russo]

On Sat, Jul 05, 2008 at 11:48:30AM -0700, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <archer at eskimo.com> flavor, containing:
> On Sat, 5 Jul 2008, Tom Russo wrote:
> 
> > The other way to do it is to specify CPPFLAGS as a configure argument rather
> > than as an exported environment variable:
> >
> >
> >  ../xastir/configure CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/include/geotiff"
> 
> I'm curious as to the reason it's having trouble finding the geotiff
> includes in /usr/include.  That's where mine are and I'm having no
> such difficulty.  I run "./configure" and it finds everything on
> OpenSuSE-11.0.  The 9.x and 10.x series found it just fine as well.

It looks as if the packaged version of libgeotiff-dev on Ubuntu 8.03 
puts the include files down a level under /usr/include instead of dumping
them right at the top level.  On my systems, where I don't use the packaged
versions, they're at top level.  We'll pick 'em up Just Fine if they're 
in /usr/include, but not if they're in /usr/include/geotiff/.

This is pretty much a package maintainer issue.  libgeotiff wasn't even
available as an Ubuntu package for quite some time --- the wiki pages
for installing libgeotiff on Ubunutu spend a fair amount of time telling the
user how to do it from source, precisely because it wasn't available in
the package system for at least the last few releases of Ubuntu..

> Is there an autoconf test that failing for some obscure reason on
> their systems?

Unless our probe deliberately were to search down a level if it fails
to find headers on the first try (which it does not do), it wouldn't 
pick them up when they're installed in weird place like this.

Adding configure command line options is always necessary to deal with 
nonstandard installs.  Peppering the configure script with tricks to look
everywhere that might have the desired files is unmaintainable and often
breaks.  Look at the mess we have for BDB --- it tries all manner of crazy
things to find db headers, and often screws up, all because no two installs
of BDB seem to be consistent.

-- 
Tom Russo    KM5VY   SAR502   DM64ux          http://www.swcp.com/~russo/
Tijeras, NM  QRPL#1592 K2#398  SOC#236 AHTB#1 http://kevan.org/brain.cgi?DDTNM
 "It's so simple to be wise: just think of something stupid to say and
  then don't say it."  --- Sam Levinson