[Xastir] Debian Squeeze Make issues

[Lee Bengston]

On 10/21/09, James Cameron <vk2lqz at wia.org.au> wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 11:13:57PM -0500, Lee Bengston wrote:
>> On 10/19/09, James Cameron <vk2lqz at wia.org.au> wrote:
>> > I don't know why the default configure doesn't pick it up.
>>
>> That problem has been brought up previously with Ubuntu.  Installing
>> libgeotiff from source instead of the repositories is another way
>> around it.  That's what is documented in the HowTo's for Ubuntu.  A
>> standard configure works when the binary geotiff package is avoided.
>
> Installing libgeotiff from source is probably the wrong thing to do
> under these circumstances, assuming long term configuration stability of
> the system is desired.
>
> Debian (and therefore Ubuntu) has modified how libgeotiff is built, in
> order to comply with policies and packaging standards.
>
> Xastir's configure could be fixed to search in the obvious alternate
> place for geotiff includes.  It would simplify the documentation and the
> install from source.  Debian (and therefore Ubuntu) handle this by
> holding the fix on behalf of Xastir.
>
> I've reviewed Xastir's configure.ac.  It doesn't search at all.
>
> So the choice is between holding knowledge of the Debian specific
> workaround in the Xastir Wiki, in the Ubuntu pages, or ... fixing
> configure.ac to better handle the situation portably.

Below is some earlier discussion...

  Lee Bengston <lee.bengston at gmail.com>	 Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 9:46 PM
To: russo at bogodyn.org, Xastir - APRS client software discussion
<xastir at xastir.org>

On Sat, Jul 5, 2008 at 7:12 PM, Tom Russo <russo at bogodyn.org> wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 05, 2008 at 12:02:07PM -0700, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <archer at eskimo.com> flavor, containing:
>> On Sat, 5 Jul 2008, Tom Russo wrote:
>>
>> > 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.
>>
>> Rgr.  BDB:  Another of nemesis of ours, and of other projects!
>>
>> If the /usr/include/geotiff/ directory becomes commonplace later I'd
>> advocate adding it to our autoconf scripts.
>
> But at this point it isn't --- geotiff's install doesn't do that itself, the
> Ubuntu package maintainer must have decided to isolate the headers for
> some reason, and just did it.
>
> A note to the maintainer might be in order.  Some packages do that, but it
> is not the norm.  I'm not sure that many packages that use libgeotiff are going
> to expect its headers to be in nonstandard locations.

Remember this geotiff/Ubuntu package discussion from July?  Recent
experience with Mepis 7.0, AntiX 7.2, and DreamLinux 3.0 has found
that the geotiff dev package is coming from Debian.  So Ubuntu, the 3
distros above, Debian, and (I expect) virtually all of the other
Debian based Linux distro's have the same geotiff package in their
repo's.  This one may be widespread enough to warrant changing the
configure script to look in /usr/include/geotiff.

Mepis, Antix, and Dreamlinux also, by the way, have access to what I
believe is the same Xastir 1.9x binary that has been available to
Ubuntu.

Regards,

Lee - K5DAT
Murphy, TX