Bug 46846

It looks like I lost this when I converted from imake -> autotools. It wasn't intentional, but do we actually want these #defines in an installed header? It seems like the kind of thing we'd do before we had pkgconfig.

If they were purely optional defines I would say yes.  But these appear to affect the API/ABI of Xaw3d and if so it really should be in the API (headers).  But I am by no means an expert here.

Hi,

I'm one of the Fedora Xaw3d maintainers. So my 2 cents on this are:
If some configure flags result in ABI changes, and those ABI changes
are mode visible to using apps through #ifdef magic in the public
headers, then the necessary defines should be part of the
headers and not of pkg-config --cflags, so that things will
work for non pkg-config-ified apps too. This is esp. true
for a library as old as Xaw3d which likely has many users
not using pkg-config.

So the configure script should automatically put the
necessary defines in a header file included by all other
header files (similar to the config.h file, but please
don't use config.h as that tends includes lot of generic
defines which will cause namespace conflicts).

Regards,

Hans

(In reply to comment #1)
> It looks like I lost this when I converted from imake -> autotools. It wasn't
> intentional, but do we actually want these #defines in an installed header? It
> seems like the kind of thing we'd do before we had pkgconfig.

Yes. but since we have only had pkgconfig support for Xaw3d for a couple months,
we can't count on the previous 15 years of applications using it yet, so putting
the defines in a header for a transition period will allow distros to package it 
without getting all the clients updated at the same time.

If this was a brand new library, then going pkgconfig only would work, but 
hopefully no one ever creates a brand new Xaw fork again.

I agree that they should be in the public .h. The src/README.XAW3D even documents it as such:

  Xaw3dP.h contains four definitions that may be
   used for this purpose. For example:

       #define XAW_INTERNATIONALIZATION
       #define XAW_MULTIPLANE_PIXMAPS
       #define XAW_GRAY_BLKWHT_STIPPLES
       #undef XAW_ARROW_SCROLLBARS

   Xaw3dP.h need not be included by the application source, as the public
   headers that reference any 3D features include this header.

It's also a good idea to make things as easy as possible for downstream users, keeping libxaw3d as self-contained as possible (why rely on xaw3d.pc telling user to do something to tell libxaw3d to do what it is ABI-coded to do, vs that feedback loop getting broken and breaking API vs ABI?).

It would be easy enough to distribute Xaw3dP.h.in that has tokens replaced by configure.ac directives to generate a hard-coded locally-correct Xaw3dP.h at build-time.

Aw heck, even Xaw3dP.h still has the placeholders and documentation for setting the API tokens. But anyway, I whipped up a patch that Works For Me(tm). See:

http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel/2012-August/033188.html

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