libxml2 package installed but cannot include, building libaiml

Question

I am trying to build a library (libaiml). I was having problems installing the library using normal methods:

./configure ; make ; make install

In the README, the author says you should use this method to install the libarary, but the standard download does not come with a configure file.

To get around this, I decided to import the source into eclipse and try building the library myself. Now I am having a problem resolving the libxml2 dependency.

I am fairly sure I have the libxml2 package installed:

matt@ubuntu:~/Desktop$ apt-cache policy libxml2
libxml2:
  Installed: 2.7.8.dfsg-5.1ubuntu4.2
  Candidate: 2.7.8.dfsg-5.1ubuntu4.2
  Version table:
 *** 2.7.8.dfsg-5.1ubuntu4.2 0
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates/main i386 Packages
        500 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-security/main i386 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     2.7.8.dfsg-5.1ubuntu4 0
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise/main i386 Packages

But eclipse is saying it cannot resolve resolve this inclusion (in aiml_parser.cpp):

#include <libxml2/parserInternals.h>

In another post, I saw that you could check if a library was installed by running the following command:

matt@ubuntu:~/Desktop$ gcc -lxml2
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lxml2
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status

If this output is telling me the library cannot be found, how is this possible when the package is installed?

Answer 1

You need to install the accompanying -dev package to be able to compile against a library. For libxml2 this would be libxml2-dev.