Re: sample gobject.pc.in file - What do the "@"s mean?

[TomF <TomF sjpc org>]

On Thu, 13 Feb 2003 17:13:48 -0500
Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com> wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 13, 2003 at 02:26:47PM -0500, Valdis Kletnieks vt edu
> wrote:
> > On Thu, 13 Feb 2003 11:19:10 PST, TomF <TomF sjpc org>  said:
> > 
> > > What do the "@"s mean in following lines:
> > > 
> > > prefix= prefix@
> > 
> > That's so a 'sed' script can do something like:
> > 
> > s% prefix@%/usr/local%
> > 
> > and leave 'prefix=/usr/local'.  Without the '@', you'd end up with a
> > line that said "/usr/local=/usr/local" which isn't very helpful.
> 
> And to complete the answer, the sed script is normally run on
> "gobject.pc.in" by "configure" to create "gobject.pc"
> 
> Havoc
> 

I am getting closer to an understanding, but still not there.  I have
never built gnome, just a few packages depending on gnome, but now want
to port gnucash frome gnome1 to gnome2, and am trying to understand the
porting guide before I start.

I think that my problem is that I want to understand how to modify
configure.in and write gnucash.pc.in so that when configure is called by
autogen, the correct pc.in will be created.  I expect to invoke autogen
via
cd /home/Tom/gnucashg2/gnucash
autogen.sh --prefix=/home/Tom/gnucash2/installd
so the current directory will contain the source, and the binaries will
be put in the installd directory.  I want to do this to keep the new
binaries out of my main directories until I have a working package
(probably over a month from now).

I am going to download the source for some of the gnome2 packages that
have *.pc files to see if I can figure out what it is in configure.in
that builds *.pc from *.pc.in.  

Is there something else I should be doing to learn how this works?