8.1.7 Manual configuration

One of the most important by-products of running ./configure is a config.h file that is used to build the coNCePTuaL run-time library. If the approach outlined in Interpreting configure warnings proves unable to convince coNCePTuaL to build the library or other component, it may be possible to address the failed tests manually by editing any incorrect definitions in config.h. In addition, running ./configure with the --enable-broken-components option will force make to attempt to build and install everything, no matter how unlikely the prospects of success are. You may need to make individual rules from the makefile in order to skip over unsalvageable parts of the build process.

The --with-header-code option to configure lets you specify a single line of C code to insert into every test file that configure generates and also into the header files used to build the run-time library. This extra line of code can be used to make up for missing functionality or to load nonstandard header files. If you need to inject more than one line of code use ./configure --with-header=code='#include "myheaders.h"' and create an appropriate myheaders.h file.

Like all Autoconf scripts, configure runs a large number of small test programs to characterize the user’s system. It keeps track of the results of these tests in a set of variables cache variables. If a cache variable is assigned a value on the command line, configure will skip the associated test and simply assume that the cache variable’s value represents the test result. Thus, cache variables provide a fine level of control over the behavior of the configure script and are a useful mechanism for working around the idiosyncrasies of any given system. See Cache Variables, for a list of many of the variables cache variables recognized by the coNCePTuaL configure script.

It is highly unlikely that ./configure will fail completely. If it does, a working coNCePTuaL system may still be possible. Manually edit config.h for your system. (If config.h could not be created, copy config.h.in to config.h.) Do likewise for ncptl.h. Finally, copy Makefile.simple.in to Makefile.simple if necessary and replace all text bracketed by at signs with appropriate values or blanks. In particular, ‘@DEFS@’ should be replaced by the string ‘-DHAVE_CONFIG_H’ as this instructs the various C files to include config.h. See Building on problematic platforms, for more information about Makefile.simple . Although Makefile.in can be copied to Makefile and edited, doing so requires many more string replacements. The advantage is that the result will support all of the options described in make.