[vtkusers] vtkConfigure.h and machine byte ordering: do I worry too much?

[Robert Belleman]

On Mon, Apr 09, 2001 at 09:46:50AM -0400, William A. Hoffman wrote:
> You should be building, or at least configuring VTK out of the source directory.
> For example:
> 
> vtk/...
> vtk-Solaris
> vtk-linux
> vtk-irix
> 
> To configure for one of those:
> 
> cd vtk-Solaris
> ../vtk/configure
> 
> All the generated .h files will be in vtk-Solaris.

Why would I want to do a thing like that?

Sure; this give me the generated .h files in a special directory, but I
might as well just copy these to a different directory after I had run
configure from within the vtk source tree itself.

Are you suggesting that, as a next step, I then change my user Makefiles
so that vtkConfigure.h and vtkToolkits.h are included from these
"architecture specific" directories? Sounds like a second rate solution
to me.

Or are you suggesting that I should maintain an architecture specific
"include" directory (next to "bin" and "lib")? Suboptimal, in my opinion,
since only two files would be different for the different architectures
(but don't have to be). But then I feel that the "install" target in the
main Makefile should do this for us.


The point I'm trying to make here, is that currently "naive" users can
infer incorrect definitions from these two include files (the byte
ordering in particular) which should either (1) have been guarded or (2)
determined at run-time.


Best,
-- Rob

[] Robert Belleman         X  Section Computational Science            []
[] robbel at science.uva.nl  |X| University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands []
[] tel: (+31) 20 525 7510  X  http://www.science.uva.nl/~robbel/       []