[Rd] Makefile vs Makevars vs configure

[Simon Urbanek]

On Dec 29, 2004, at 2:06 PM, Whit Armstrong wrote:

> The reason I need help with Makevars is because it needs jni.h from the
> user's JAVA_HOME/include and jni_md.h from the user's
> JAVA_HOME/include/OS_TYPE directory.
>
> In addition, it needs libjvm.so from the user's
> JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/ARCH/client directory.
>
> I've looked at the SJava package with the idea of using a similar 
> configure
> script, but I was hoping I could just get by with a Makevars file 
> rather
> than a configure script.

That is virtually impossible unless you let the user add all paths 
manually. Each OS, platform, VM vendor and VM version(!) use different 
paths and you need different include directories and libs. What you end 
up doing in your Makefile is what the configure script does, so I see 
no benefit from not using it. AFAIR SJava doesn't detect Apple Java - 
you may have a look at rJava's configure script which tries to be a bit 
more general, but your mileage may vary.

Cheers,
Simon