Use pkg-config to detect flags

[fsimonis]

It may be worth looking into the pkgconfig package.

We could use this to extract the necessary compiler flags for preCICE.

[BenjaminRodenberg]

As far as I understand this issue only the following flags might be provided through pkgconfig:

python-bindings/setup.py

Line 44 in c03e392

link_args.append("-lprecice")

The remaining flags have been removed in #36 when we removed MPI. @fsimonis am overseeing something? Do you think that replacing -lprecice is worth dealing with pkgconfig?

[MakisH]

Important note here: pkg-config also returns more than that: it also returns the include path and the library path (apart from the library name). It can be e.g. something like -I/usr/local/include -L/usr/local/lib -lprecice.

In your case it probably skips the paths because they are system paths. But it is a very handy tool if you have your dependencies in non-system directories. You just need to make pkg-config aware of the existence of your dependency (e.g. adding the path to the libprecice.pc file into the PKG_CONFIG_PATH).

[BenjaminRodenberg]

Thanks for the info! Sounds like good arguments for keeping this issue open. I will look into it.

[BenjaminRodenberg]

Picking up this issue, because I stumbled over it when trying to build the bindings on top of our spack baseimage. pkg-config helped me to determine the right paths, if preCICE was installed with spack and the bindings were installed from source by checking out this repository. Will try to quickly prepare a PR.

[IshaanDesai]

Closed via #149