Hello Martin, * Martin Kalbfuß wrote on Sun, Jan 10, 2010 at 10:59:52PM CET: > I like to know if > > make & make install & program_name > > is the typically development work flow.
For many developers, I guess so. (If you meant the above literally, then you need to use && instead of &.) However, autotools explicitly support running uninstalled programs. One rationale is that you don't want to install potentially-buggy software. (One workaround for this is to install the development code into private locations, using a different configure --prefix.) > I'm not sure if the program should get installed. If not, I don't know > how to the program should find the data files properly. > > I'm generally not sure how the compiled program should find it's data > files. passing something to config.h, use an environment variable or > something similar? Typically, you either allow to pass a command line argument to your program that overrides the installed location of your data, or an environment variable. One way to automate this in your build tree is to write a small shell wrapper for your program that calls your program with this argument/variable set. For example, the Autoconf and the Automake packages both do it this way: they create small shell scripts in their respective tests/ directories (named autoconf, autoreconf, aclocal-$APIVERSION, automake-$APIVERSION), which invoke the uninstalled programs with some variables or command lines arguments set. Hope that helps. Cheers, Ralf
