I wanted to build a customized and specifically optimized povray_3.5 for
my personal Debian box. Apart from the obvious #error, there was one funny
situation. I felt it would be good to post my observation here, in case
someone else might find it useful.

  Povray's configure-script checks for various things, among other things
the presence of libvgagl.so (from SVGAlib). Most enlightened users usually
try to avoid that library as much as possible, because it's one of the
annoying libraries requiring root privileges to work. Direct access to
devices and all that. The script assumes that if libvgagl.so is found, there
is also the development package installed.

  Here's the kicker: packaged gnuplot depends on svgalib, or its
dummy-package. Few people have svgalib1g-dev installed, because it is so
rarely needed. When configure-script finds the dummy library, it immediately
assumes that svgalib is wanted. This results in a make error during the
build. "./configure --help" provides no information that a switch to turn
off svgalib detection exists.

  I resorted to the idiot's solution and temporarily removed the dummy
svgalib from my system before calling the configure. Gnuplot went in the
process. After that, the build went nicely. The next thing I did, was
naturally build a personal debian package with -O3 optimizations :)

  I now have the dummy package and gnuplot reinstalled, as well as a version
of povray that shows in the package manager list. Keywords for this were
deb-make and dpkg-buildpackage.

  It would be nice if the configure-script had the --without-* or
--disable-* options to remove certain dependencies.  Without such, building
povray on Debian with gnuplot and dummy svgalib installed requires some
hacking - either with installed packages or the automake/autoconf scripts
and resource files.

-- 

 Bos### [at] lutfi    www.lut.fi/~bostik  X    and all the devils
 Security freak, and proud of it.    /-\   are here." -W.S.

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