From Kurt.Hornik@ci.tuwien.ac.at  Wed Nov 15 10:18:41 2000
From: Kurt.Hornik@ci.tuwien.ac.at (Kurt Hornik)
Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 11:18:41 +0100
Subject: [Rd] standardized add-on package configuration
Message-ID: <14866.25345.561674.760076@mithrandir.hornik.net>

Several add-on packages (e.g., most DBMS ones, XML, ...) come with a
configure script which tries to find headers and libraries required by
the package.  I was wondering whether we could/should standardize how
this is done.

In what follows, suppose package FOO needs functionality BAR.

* One approach would be via command-line arguments to configure.  There
  seems to be no standard for this.  GNOME uses

	--with-FOO-prefix
	--with-FOO-exec-prefix

  in several of its components.  However, this, assumes that the GNU
  standards are followed in the sense that headers go into

	FOO-prefix/include

  and libs go into

	FOO-exec-prefix/lib

  which might not necessarily be the case.

  Alternatively, we could have

	--with-FOO-libraries
	--with-FOO-libs

  and

	--with-FOO-includes
	--with-FOO-headers

  (one of each only, of course).

* The other possibility would be via environment variables, such as
  CPPFLAGS and LIBS or maybe FOO_CPPFLAGS and FOO_LIBS.  (E.g., for
  package XML we would use LIBXML_CPPFLAGS and LIBXML_LIBS.)

I think the simplest solution would be via CPPFLAGS and LIBS because it
is not package-specific.  So installation would happen via

	CPPFLAGS=... LIBS=... R CMD INSTALL /path/to/pkg.tar.gz

(did not check if this works now).

Now I did not check all packages, so is there something I may be
overlooking?

(Once we agree on a standard, I would like to document it in R-exts.)

-k
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[Rd] standardized add-on package configuration
Kurt Hornik