Is there any way to list all required libraries when configuring at a time?

Question

Is there any way to list all required libraries when configuring generic linux source package at a time? Repeating find lacking lib by ./configure and installing it keep me long sometimes. or any efficient way more than what I'm doing now will help me

Answer 1

Not in general. I suspect it's a Turing-complete problem because the configure script and the linker could do anything.

You'll either have to read the documentation and hope the information is in there, or you could download some packaging scripts that someone already made (that is, the RPM spec or the Deb source package) and install the build dependencies.

Answer 2

In general case, most that you can do is view ./configure script and try to find all checks for external libraries. There may be more accurate solition for GNU configure, but I'm not sure about it. Usually, developers write file called INSTALL or README and list in it all external packages that needed for building application.

Also, you can try to find your application in build systems like FreeBSD ports or Gentoo portage. If it build, it shurely have all depends listed.

Answer 3

See config.log file. It contains more detailed info on what's going on.

Or use Debian and run ./configure command once a year, roughly.