Hello! On Sun, Aug 06, 2006 at 04:20:11PM -0700, Richard Haney wrote:
It seems to me that an extremely good idea is to make a general practice of keeping separate software packages in separate file hierarchies, This is in fact very bad idea...
especially when one is installing packages tentatively and may want to delete or uninstall such packages later. .. but nothing prevents you from using --prefix=/whatever/you/want.
In other words, it seems an extremely good idea to keep packages as mutually independent as possible, and when dependence is necessary, to make it very clear (by adding strategically named annotation files, for example) what that dependence is. These dependences are specified in debian/* (and GiNaC.spec.in).
and moreover it seems to be more complication for the user than should be necessary. You made this complication yourself (by choosing weird installation paths).
It seems one possibility would be a command such as ./configure CLN="C:/gnu/cln-1.1.11/gcc342" READLINE="C:/gnu/readline-5.1/gcc342" TERMCAP="C:/gnu/termcap-1.3.1/gcc342"
GiNaC configure script provides --with-cln-prefix option
Another improvement that seems a good idea is in general to place a single value -- such as, for example, the configure script's option value of "--prefix" -- in one standard location that all Makefiles would refer to,
You might want to read autoconf manual, specifically the chapter about CONFIG_SITE variable.
I would like to hear what others think of the general idea and various practices in managing software packages to be as mutually independent as possible, except where dependence is really needed. Long time ago package managers was written to solve these problems. If your OS lacks such a package manager, GiNaC is not going to provide one.
think porting dpkg/APT to win32 would be better approach.
As experience shows, it seems to me that the build process needs to be designed to allow for the possibilities that bugs will appear and that a relatively build-unspecialized user needs to respond to those bugs in a flexible manner.
May be this user should read http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html first? Best regards, Alexei. -- All science is either physics or stamp collecting.