Re: User specified location of GD not carried into Makefiles

[Ethan A M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Monday 29 January 2007 17:50, m sutton wrote:
> 
> Let me try to explain this some more.  I work on some systems that 
> are locked down.  I cannot add packages as root.  So this means I 
> have to build and install in my local home directory.  Furthermore, 
> I often build only the static libraries for things like GD.

Will that even work? 
libgd itself links to so many other libraries that a static build
seems at best cumbersome, and at worst incompatible. In particular
I would worry about dragging in a static version of libX11.

lascaux [806] ldd /home/local/lib/libgd.so.2.0.33
        linux-gate.so.1 =>  (0xffffe000)
        libXpm.so.4 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXpm.so.4 (0xb7f80000)
        libX11.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libX11.so.6 (0xb7eb4000)
        libjpeg.so.62 => /usr/lib/libjpeg.so.62 (0xb7e94000)
        libfontconfig.so.1 => /usr/lib/libfontconfig.so.1 (0xb7e64000)
        libfreetype.so.6 => /usr/lib/libfreetype.so.6 (0xb7dfb000)
        libpng12.so.0 => /usr/lib/libpng12.so.0 (0xb7dd5000)
        libz.so.1 => /lib/libz.so.1 (0xb7dc1000)
        libm.so.6 => /lib/tls/libm.so.6 (0xb7d9c000)
        libc.so.6 => /lib/tls/libc.so.6 (0xb7c6e000)
        libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0xb7c6a000)
        libexpat.so.0 => /usr/lib/libexpat.so.0 (0xb7c4a000)
        /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x80000000)

> My reasoning is the configure script should examine a --with-gd 
> specified path before checking the $PATH.  After all I just 
> explicitly told configure where to look.  If the --with-gd path is 
> not respected then the wrong gd.h file will be included.

See previous comments.  
This should not matter, as gd.h is not significantly version-dependent. 

> As for the link time options to remember the path (-R, -rpath),  
> implementing this gets trickier because there is not a standard 

Yes, I agree. The -rpath mechanism is not widely used.
 
> I hope that makes my rationale clearer.

Gnuplot's ./configure mechanism was not designed for cross-compilation
or for building an executable for running in a totally different
environment.   I think you are expecting too much of it.
If I were you, I would just tweak src/Makefile after running
./configure.  You can add include and link paths as you please.
If you are already prepared to fiddle the compile flags to create a
static executable, the rest of the tweaking seems relatively minor.


-- 
Ethan A Merritt
Biomolecular Structure Center
University of Washington, Seattle 98195-7742