No lib or include dir in Ghostscript?!!

Today I had a lot of problems trying to compile ImageMagick with Ghostscript support. When I configured ImageMagick using the --with-gslib option it would show in the configuration summary that it would be compiled without ghostscript support. (There are three columns, the first lists the delegate lib name (ghostscript), the second whether it was requested to include that lib (yes) and the third whether it would be included (no)).

So I downloaded and built ghostscript-9.18 from source, but when built the install directory contained no lib or include dir! Sadly I couldn't find anything similar by searching the web. I found some information that said you need to use make so rather than just make to build shared libs. But that didn't make any difference. Then in the ghostscript build / source dir I found there was a folder called sobin or binso I think, which contained two bin files and the shared libs.

So I created a lib dir inside the dir where ghostscript had been installed to, then copied the ghostscript .so files across. Running ImageMagick's configure again I now got further - no (failed tests) was the status for gslib. Checking config.log in the ImageMagick source / build dir I found it was looking for some missing ghostscript header files. I found the files it was looking for in the ghostscript source / build dir, inside the psi sub directory. Rather than try and pull just the needed files, I copied the entire contents of the psi directory to an include dir I created inside the ghostscript install dir.

That made no progress, but looking at ImageMagick's config.log again it was easy to see why - it was looking in a ghostscript dir inside the include dir, and I had just pasted the files straight into an include dir. So creating a ghostscript dir inside the include dir and moving the files from psi to there fixed that problem. Almost.

Running ImageMagick's configure again, there were still some missing ghostscript header files. I found one in the ghostscript source / build dir under the base sub directory, so again I just copied the entire contents of that directory into the ghostscript install dir include/ghostscript dir. And ImageMagick would now configure and give me a yes for Ghostscript!

I should mention that I have ghostscript installed to a non-standard dir using the prefix configure option. So I had to also specify LDFLAGS and CPPFLAGS when configuring ImageMagick, so that it could pick up the ghostscript include and lib dirs after I had manually created and filled them.

There was just one last issue - under delegate programs ImageMagick's configure output was showing an older version of ghostscript. My guess is that my OS (Ubuntu) has ghostscript installed, but not the development libraries. So to get ImageMagick to see my stupid install of ghostscript, I just had to specify the path to its bin folder in the PATH var when configuring ImageMagick.

Of course, it may well be that my ghostscript install is completely broken and ImageMagick won't actually be able to do anything ghostscript related when I try it. But at least I got it to compile with ghostscript OK!

Oh yeah, another weird thing when configuring ImageMagick was that when I specified the PKG_CONFIG_PATH for other libs (jpeg, tiff, lzma) I have in non-standard locations, it found some of them, but other ones it didn't. I had to use LDFLAGS and CPPFLAGS for the ones it didn't find.

P.S. PKG_CONFIG_PATH and PATH use a : colon as the separator, LDFLAGS and CPPFLAGS use a space.

Needless to say, I don't plan on trying to compile ImageMagick with ghostscript support on my actual web server.