pkginclude and pkglib?

[Dave Morrison <dave at bnl dot gov>]

Hi all,

Right now, the gsl makefiles are set up to install headers in
pkgincludedir (e.g., /usr/local/include/gsl) and the libraries in
pkglibdir (e.g., /usr/local/lib/gsl).  This works, everything's fine,
and all that, but may I suggest a change?  The way things are you have
to have a compile time flag (-I/usr/local/include/gsl) and also a link
time flag (-L/usr/local/lib/gsl) to build software that uses gsl.  

I'm not sure all that much is really gained by putting the gsl libraries
in a special subdirectory, especially if we go back to having a single
gsl library.  Is /usr/local/lib/gsl/libgsl.so that much more organized
and free from namespace collisions than just /usr/local/lib/libgsl.so? 
So, I'd suggest installing the gsl libraries simply in libdir.

I can better appreciate the point about keeping the headers segregated,
but in that case, it would be nice if gsl referred to its own headers
using the `pkg' prefix

#include "gsl/gsl_blas.h"

or if we skipped the `pkg' segregation, and just counted on the "gsl_"
prefix to distinguish gsl's headers from others that might be found in
includedir.  With either change, the need for a gsl-specific `-I' flag
when building user code would go away, wouldn't it?

Cheers,
Dave
-- 
David Morrison  Brookhaven National Laboratory  phone: 631-344-5840
                Physics Department, Bldg 510 C    fax: 631-344-3253
		          Upton, NY 11973-5000  email: dave@bnl.gov