[vtkusers] autoconf macros to check for VTK

[Mathieu Malaterre]

Francesco,

	Please go to the CMake page at http://cmake.org, you should understand 
why VTK does not make use of the autoconf/automake thing. You have to 
understand that VTK is aimed at being cross plateform and CMake try to 
respect every plateform while offering the tool you are used to develop 
(XCode, Visual Studio...). How do you expect being able to support that 
with autotools/autoconf/automake ?

	As a side note when I create a new project that need VTK I write in my 
CMakeLists.txt:

FIND_PACKAGE(VTK REQUIRED)
INCLUDE(${VTK_USE_FILE})

	Can autoconf be more succint ?

Mathieu
Ps: Another good ref:

[Stop the autoconf insanity! Why we need a new build system.]
http://freshmeat.net/articles/view/889/

Francesco Montorsi wrote:
> any vtk developer can comment on this ?
> 
> Thanks,
> Francesco
> 
> 
> Francesco Montorsi wrote:
> 
>> 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
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