[vtkusers] autoconf macros to check for VTK

[Francesco Montorsi]

Hello all,
    I've found this mail in vtkusers archive; I'm in the same situation.
Does anyone knows of an M4 macro which can be used in configure scripts to detect VTK 
installations ?

If it does not exist, I'm going to write it.
However before doing that I would like to know from VTK developers if they plan to ever 
include something like a .pc file for pkg-config in linux VTK distro. It would be a small 
file to add to VTK installation process which would make a lot easier using VTK under unix 
as you should then write just:

pkg-config vtk --cxxflags

to get the CXXFLAGS required to compile a program/lib against VTK. The same would be for 
--libs. A .pc file is quite easy to write and it would solve the autoconf macro problem as 
I would then use the PKG_CHECK_MODULES(VTK ...) macro.

Thanks,
Francesco Montorsi



 >Anybody out there writing software that uses VTK and builds with
 >autoconf? In my current projects that need it I'm forcing users to
 >specify --with-vtk=/path/to/vtk as an argument to the ./configure
 >script, but this is less than ideal.
 >
 >Anyone else run into this before? Do you have your own custom autoconf
 >macros to look for VTK in some obvious paths? Would you like to share?
 >=)
 >
 >-tom