Path: utzoo!yunexus!geac!syntron!jtsv16!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!tekcrl.crl!toddb
From: toddb@tekcrl.crl (Todd Brunhoff)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Imakefiles (was: file name lengths for contributed software)
Message-ID: <8808191814.AA11133@tekcrl.CRL.TEK.COM>
Date: 19 Aug 88 18:14:45 GMT
Article-I.D.: tekcrl.8808191814.AA11133
References: <8808191315.AA05177@teak.cs.rochester.edu>
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 36

>> I don't like to use Imakefiles...  So, I don't have a fully populated
>> X11 src tree sitting around.  Thus, Imakefiles are difficult to use
>> when building just one piece of X11 s/w....  However, when I build code
>> after the initial X11 installation, I want to link against the
>> installed library's and include the installed header files.  I don't
>> want to go looking in $(TOP)/.... for these.  How can we meet these two
>> needs together?

The usage of imake has become convoluted: the command line arguments that
are required make it too much trouble to use interactively at the keyboard.
I believe that the right solution is:
    1. make the current use of options for the imake command (the ones
	used in the makefiles) the defaults for imake.
    2. implement a method of generating "absolute" imake include files
	from the stuff that lives in util/imake.includes such that
	all the include and library file names are absolute
With these changes, you install these generated imake include files in
imake's system-wide directory (right now its /usr/lib/local/imake.includes),
and then imake could be used by itself in any directory
to generate a makefile.  Instead of saying 'make Makefile', you
could simply type

	imake

And your Makefile would appear.  This would help in general, because
sometimes I pick up software up off the net that has an Imakefile, but
the only way to generate a makefile is to install the software
somewhere in the x11 source tree; something I'm not always willing to
do.

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