[Xastir] libxp and Xastir

[Tom Russo]

I have been following the recent question about Ubuntu 15.10 and the missing
"libxp-dev" on that system.

Apparently, the X Printing Extension provided by libXp has been deprecated,
and Ubuntu/Debian have chosen to stop providing it in their package management
system.

The good news is that Xastir does not in fact use any functions in this library
itself.  The bad news is that SOMETIMES a motif library might require it, or
at least this used to be true.  

Looking through Xastir's configure.ac file, I see a note that I added back in
2007 that nothing in Xastir actually USES libXp.  Back then I had tried to
remove configure's probe for Xp functions, and found out that some Linux 
system somewhere had a Motif library that required it as a dependency, but
didn't properly pull it in as a shared library.  The result was that I had
to reinstate the check three days later.
 

>From the commit log for configure.ac:
-------
revision 1.178
date: 2007/01/27 18:41:12;  author: tvrusso;  state: Exp;  lines: +6 -4
re-enable check for the X Printing Extension library.  Apparently this
is needed by libXm and some systems do not properly bring in the
indirect dependence through the dynamic loader.

It would probably be better to detect that condition than just blindly
checking for Xp (which we don't use).

Regardless, it should never be necessary to install development headers
for libXp just to build xastir, which was what one user was confused
about and which led me to remove the check in the first place.
----------------------------
revision 1.177
date: 2007/01/24 21:19:40;  author: tvrusso;  state: Exp;  lines: +6 -2
Remove probe for the X Printing Extension library.

Xastir doesn't use it, and there's no point probing for it.

Someone was confused into thinking they needed to install it on Ubuntu 6.10
because configure said it couldn't find the library.  They don't, coz we don't use it.
---------


It may very well be the case that in the last 8 years this sorry state of
affairs has been corrected, and that probe can be removed --- rendering it
unnecessary to have libxp installed at all, or at least not unless another
package pulls it in as a dependency itself.

Please try the following:
 - edit configure.ac in the Xastir source tree, and find the following line:
   AC_CHECK_LIB([Xp], [XpGetDocumentData]) 
 - Comment out this line by adding "#" at the beginning
 - Run the "bootstrap.sh" script in the source directory
 - Try reconfiguring and building Xastir now

If Xastir builds and runs, then at least on Ubuntu 15.10 we can stop 
probing for the Xp library. 

Whether some other system continues to require us to add Xp to our library
list ourselves is an open question.  I bet it is no longer necessary.  

-- 
Tom Russo    KM5VY   SAR502   DM64ux          http://www.swcp.com/~russo/
Tijeras, NM  QRPL#1592 K2#398  SOC#236        http://kevan.org/brain.cgi?DDTNM
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