Re: HOWTO check for headers and libs in various directories?

[Steve Robbins]

On Mon, Jan 08, 2001 at 04:58:42PM +0100, Daniele Arena wrote:
> Hi Vaclav,
> 
> I had the same problem with MySQL and other external packages, and I
> couldn't find anything really appropriate. The smartest thing I could do
> was to hack configure.in 

  [... to add --with-mysqlinc and --with-mysqlincdir options ... ]


> autoconf, so if anyone else out there has solved the problem in a more
> elegant way, please let me(us!) know...

My solution is similar to yours, in that it introduces two new options
to the configure script, but there are several differences

1. Matt Langston and I have coded it up into a macro, which reduces
   clutter in the configure.in 
   (especially if you have multiple 3rd party libs)

2. the macro will test the include dir by looking for a specified 
   header

3. the macro will test the lib dir by attempting to link with the
   library (this will, e.g., catch libfoo.so as well as libfoo.a)

4. because of points 2 and 3, the "--with-..." arguments are optional;
   if the library is in a standard place, it will be found


The macro set can be found on sourceforge (thanks to Matt):

        http://sourceforge.net/projects/acmacros/

-Steve