Re: Questions of a newbie Debian package developer working on an Icon 9.0package.
On Sat, 13 Apr 1996, Christian Hudon wrote:
> The general, generic question is: when a software package can be configured
> at compile-time to support X or no to support it, how do you handle that in
> Debian packages?
The policy so far is to include support for X if it exists, and make the
package depend on elf-x11r6lib. This is what's been done for emacs, etc.
> Or do I require elf-x11r6libs and ship only the X version of Icon? It
> doesn't seem very "elegant" either...
The X libraries are installed as 'standard' anyway - people have to take
explicit action at installation time if they don't want them to be
installed. The rest of X is 'optional'.
> iconc seems to assume /usr/X11R6/lib is in the compiler's standard search
> path for libraries... And it's not on my system. Is it just me, or is it
> like that for other Debian/Linux people too? If it's not just me, wouldn't
> it be a good idea to have /usr/X11R6/{lib,include} in gcc's standard search
> path? Or, put another way, *any reason* why they're not in gcc's search
> path by default?
The standard is for things that need X libraries to have to include
/usr/X11R6/lib explicitly on the compiler command line. This is most
portable between different systems. Makefiles produced using imake have
this included in them automatically. There is a symlink from
/usr/include/X11 to /usr/X11R6/include/X11, and all #includes for X
headers are of the form #include <X11/thing.h> which will work anyway.
As for putting them in gcc's search path, ask the gcc maintainer. I'm
going to keep quiet about this, as I don't have a strong opinion either way.
Steve Early
sde1000@cam.ac.uk
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