
On Mon, Nov 29, 2004 at 01:59:45PM +0200, Einar Karttunen wrote:
Ross Paterson
writes: There's an opportunity here to make another small extension to the simple build infrastructure, namely to preprocess package descriptions with cpp, possibly using header files generated by the configure step. That would be enough for the simple build to handle packages like X11, HGL, GLUT, OpenGL and OpenAL, where building is system-dependent. Indeed almost all of the packages in fptools/libraries could be handled this way.
Using cpp does not help with many packages, using e.g. programs like foo-config. This is true for at least gtk, fltk, and so on. Also to include the headers containing the definitions on needs system dependent -I options for cpp...
True, simple will only get you so far, but the point is you can get quite a bit further for a small cost. (But if you only need the -I options for source files, not Setup.description, then cpp can put them in an extra-cc-opts field.) You could have a configure that calls fltk-config --libs and stashes the result -- a bit clunky, but fits the interface.