[Xastir] Help on error msg...

[Tom Russo]

On Sun, Aug 01, 2010 at 03:27:10PM -0700, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <curt.we7u at gmail.com> flavor, containing:
> On Sun, 1 Aug 2010, Lee Bengston wrote:
> 
> > For quite some time now, Debian, Ubuntu, and other Debian based
> > distro's have had a similar problem.  The geotiff library from the
> > repos has been installing in /usr/include/geotiff.  We've been getting
> > around it by running configure as follows:
> >
> > ../configure CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/include/geotiff"
> >
> > It's in the installation notes for Ubuntu 10.04 as well as some of the
> > earlier versions.
> 
> Should no longer by necessary with current CVS.  Tweaked
> configure.ac to add that path, which fixes my problem and yours.
> 
>      cvs update
>      ./bootstrap.sh
>      ./configure
>      make
> 
> You should be good.

But the patch you made will only work on the systems that put libgeotiff 
headers into a "libgeotiff" subdirectory --- not at all a universal thing,
and not what Ubuntu does (they put it in "geotiff").  So to account for all
the possible variations one would have to add lots more.  Start down this
path, and the configure script will be even more of a mess than it already
is.

It is a bad approach to start peppering configure.ac with system-specific
hacks like this, because it will quickly become unmaintainable.  It is much
better to add the CPPFLAGS setting at configure time and to update documentation
instead.

Our configure.ac script is becoming a little too bandaided for special cases,
and it will become a manitenance headache.  ./configure is great when everything
can be found simply, but as soon as different systems start putting installs
in random, non-default locations it is important to remember that configure
was NOT designed to go out hunting for all possible permutations of file 
locations.  Passing the CPPFLAGS deal in is the standard and maintainable way 
of telling configure it's dealing with something non-standard.

-- 
Tom Russo    KM5VY   SAR502   DM64ux          http://www.swcp.com/~russo/
Tijeras, NM  QRPL#1592 K2#398  SOC#236        http://kevan.org/brain.cgi?DDTNM
 "The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off."