[GRASS5] [building questions]

[Glynn Clements]

Sergiusz Pawlowicz wrote:

> > > o compile everything, incl NVIZ without PG (note, no ";" to
> > >   be used):
> > >           CFLAGS=-O2 LDFLAGS="-s" ./configure --without-postgres
> > >           make
> >
> > Because often people do not have the PG libs installed. We had
> > that problem with a release in the past, that's why we decided
> > to go for the "minimum" impact compilation to enable
> > everybody to use NVIZ.
> 
> Ok - so what do you think about releasing several sets
> of grass binaries - with different libraries compiled in?

Mostly, there isn't any real need. We supply everything, and the user
gets to use anything for which they have the necessary libraries.

The key issue is NVIZ. It can be built with or without PostgreSQL
support. If it's built with PostgreSQL support, it won't work at all
on systems which don't have libpq. So, we supply NVIZ without
PostgreSQL support; it might be worthwhile supply a PostgreSQL enabled
version of NVIZ as an add-on.

I'm not aware of any other cases where a library dependency is
optional, but there may be a few cases where this should change, e.g.

+ NVIZ requires libtiff, but would still be usable without TIFF
export; it supports PPM export without any additional libraries. 
However, inclusion of src/libes/ogsf/gsd_img_tif.c would need to be
conditionalised upon the availability of libtiff.

+ d.text.freetype uses the iconv functions if they are available; this
may introduce a dependency upon libiconv (but not on GNU systems,
where iconv() etc are in libc).

TIFF and iconv should probably be made configure options, rather than
being required (OGSF/TIFF) or used automatically when present
(d.text.freetype/iconv).

Another option would be to provide additional binaries which have been
statically linked against any non-standard libraries.

-- 
Glynn Clements <glynn.clements at virgin.net>