Re: [BUG] config.ac

[Achim G. <Str...@ne...>]

Ethan A Merritt via gnuplot-beta writes:
> I really don't know if this is correct or not.

Me neither, but at least it provides the result I need for building
gnuplot on Cygwin (with cygport) without explicit specififcation of
TEXDIR.  Cygport does set $prefix on invocation of the configury, so I
did get an unexpected (and non-working) TEXDIR location.  This is ion
contrast to the openSUSE Linux distributions I consulted the build logs
of their package for and the reason for the unexpected behaviour was
that their build system apparently does not explicitly set $prefix (but
must have the default prefix pointing to the system and not the local
installation directories).

> In my experience there are so many places that the TeX stuff might go,
> your only hope is to manually specify where it is on the current
> system.  It doesn't help any that according to the man page "the
> syntax for kpsexpand is incompatible with teTeX´s as of version 0.4"

Ehm… teTex is unmaintained for over ten years now and was always
suggested to be replaced by TeXLive, which is what all major distros and
of course also Cygwin are using.

> I read the existing ./configure logic to be that anything kpsexpand
> returns is where things would be by default, but if you are specifying
> a $prefix then you are overriding the default.
> Does it ever make sense to mix the two?  

The generic $prefix should just decide which of potentially several
install locations is chosen (eg. /usr, /usr/local, /opt, …).  But in
this test as originally written, specifying a $prefix (even if it's just
repeating the default location) makes configure fall back to the "I
don't know anything" branch that puts those files under an application
specific directory.  This is at least surprising, if not plain wrong.

I have no idea if there's a better way to ask autotools about the proper
location (I didn't find any pkg-config stuff for TeXLive), but it seems
that this should be a problem that has already been solved elsewhere.


Regards,
Achim.
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