[vbox-dev] configure fails with distros

[Frank Mehnert]

Jan,

On Tuesday 19 August 2008, Jan Engelhardt wrote:
> The configure script (which is not really an autotools configure, and I
> guess should not be named as such then)

configure is just a name which describes what this tool does.

> assumes that Qt lives in 
> particular locations, which is a horribly wrong assumption.

Why 'horribly wrong'? Qt3 is normally installed into a specific
location. Actually that configure script works fine at least for

Mandriva 2007/2008, Debian Sarge-Sid, Ubuntu 6.06-8.04, openSUSE 10.2-11,
Fedora 5-9, rhel3-5, Gentoo and some others. So I don't think that the
assumption about a specific loaction is that bad.

Which distribution are you talking about?

> $ ./configure --build-debug --disable-kmods --disable-pulse
> --disable-alsa --disable-xpcom
> Checking for Qt3:
>   Qt3 not found at "/usr/qt/3 /usr/lib/qt3 /usr/lib/qt-3.3 /usr/share/qt3
> /usr/lib64/qt-3.3 /usr/X11R6 /usr/lib/qt" or Qt3 headers not found Check
> the file /home/jengelh/Coding/vbox/VirtualBox-1.6.4/configure.log for
> detailed error information.
>
>
> So let's unravel it.
>
>
> $ tail -n5 configure.log
> using the following command line:
> g++ -O -Wall -o .tmp_out .tmp_src.cc -I/usr/lib/qt/include
> -L/usr/lib/qt/lib64 -lqt-mt -lpthread .tmp_src.cc:2:21: error: qglobal.h:
> No such file or directory
> .tmp_src.cc: In function 'int main()':
> .tmp_src.cc:5: error: 'QT_VERSION_STR' was not declared in this scope
>
>
> So qt3 is installed in /usr, like most packages in most distributions.
> Let's try again.
>
> $ ./configure --build-debug --disable-kmods --disable-pulse --disable-alsa
> --disable-xpcom --with-qt-dir=/usr [fail]
> $ tail -n5 configure.log
> g++ -O -Wall -o .tmp_out .tmp_src.cc -I/usr/include -L/usr/lib64 -lqt-mt
> -lpthread
>
>
> Now the libdir looks good, though the include path is still wrong,
> because it is located in /usr/include/qt3, and I do not see a way
> without touching the configure script to configure it. Could you use

Qt3 (in contrast to Qt4) is usually installed into a specific directory
with the following structure:

  /usr/share/qt3
    .../bin
      .../linguist
      .../lupdate
      ... and some other binaries
    .../include
      .../qglobal.h
      ... and much more header files
    .../lib
    .../doc
    .... and some other directories

> pkg-config instead of hardwiring paths pretty please? There are so many

Yes, I can search for 'pkg-config --cflags --libs qt-mt' as well.

> things hardcoded in this configure... like -g for debug. How about
> moving to autoconf-- so that I can just do `./configure CFLAGS=-ggdb3
> CXXFLAGS=-ggdb3` and enjoy the rest of the day.

We didn't use autoconf because it causes usually too much pain. For
instance, there are many different incompatible versions of autoconf.

Kind regards,

Frank
-- 
Dr.-Ing. Frank Mehnert    Sun Microsystems    http://www.sun.com/
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