Question

I’ve got a project written in C++ (with glibmm helping), and I’m using autotools to manage it. The question I have to ask is ‘HOW ON EARTH DO I FIGURE OUT WHERE TO LOAD STUFF FROM?’. While I can find all the guides I want to on autotools, none answer this question.

For example, maps go in $DATADIR/maps (usually /usr/[local/]share/myprogram/maps. Autotools does the right thing and puts them there, but how do I know whether it put them there or $HOME/myprogram/maps and load them appropriately (idealy it’d would search $PWD first, but that’s easy).

Answer 1

Jonathan Leffler answer was helpful (he provided enough info for me to apt-get source evolution and find what I needed to do), but it didn’t entirely answer my question, so I’ll post the complete solution here:

In configure.ac (or configure.in, whatever) I added the following lines at the end:

# Defines so we know where to look privdatadir='${datadir}'/myprogram AC_SUBST(privdatadir)  mapsdir='${privdatadir}'/maps AC_SUBST(mapsdir) 

In src/Makefile.am, the following was added:

AM_CXXFLAGS = -DMYPROGRAM_MAPSDIR=\'$(mapsdir)\' 

In the actual C++ code, the following was used:

const std::string file_directory (MYPROGRAM_MAPSDIR); // Defined in Makefile.am 

Once again, thanks Jonathan for showing me where to look, but I wanted to post the complete answer for posterity.