Re: how to use libraries in /usr/local

[Russ Allbery]

Bruno Haible <address@hidden> writes:

> I would like to propose a "configure" option --use-local which,
> depending on the language being used, does the following. For C and C++,
> it appends " -I/usr/local/include" to CPPFLAGS and " -L/usr/local/lib"
> to LDFLAGS. For Fortran, it should do similar things.

What if your /usr/local isn't called /usr/local?  It's quite frequently
called something else, particularly for site-wide installations on shared
file systems where individual systems may want to have their own (usually
much smaller) /usr/local in addition to the site-wide installation.

As proposed, I think this idea lack generality.

If it were decided to try to solve this problem in general with an
autoconf macro, it would also be good to have a similar option like
--use-fhs to put everything in the appropriate places for an FHS-compliant
system, and probably another option to put things into /opt... so what may
be wanted instead is a more general class of file layout options that
could be used instead of the innumerable (and non-extensible, at least in
2.13) --*dir options.

-- 
Russ Allbery (address@hidden)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>