I'm trying to build libreOffice. Even though cups is installed, I get the below configuration error.

...
checking whether to enable CUPS support... yes
checking whether cups support is present... checking for cupsPrintFiles in -lcups... no
checking cups/cups.h usability... yes
checking cups/cups.h presence... yes
checking for cups/cups.h... yes
configure: error: Could not find CUPS. Install libcups2-dev or cups-devel.

There's nothing in the cups package about building this dev part. Not sure what I'm missing here. I even built cups with static libraries.

Any ideas?

Are you using CUPS-2.0.2 or later?

yes.

Just to keep moving forward, I disabled cups from the autogen. I have never been able to build libreOffice and every now and then I give it a try. This time I got pretty far but received an odd build error towards the end. Any idea of how to get past this?

======================================================================
ERROR: test_ssl_import (testssl.SSLTest)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/root/libreoffice-5.0.0.2/pyuno/qa/pytests/testssl.py", line 6, in test_ssl_import
import ssl
File "/usr/lib/python3.4/ssl.py", line 97, in <module>
import _ssl # if we can't import it, let the error propagate
ImportError: No module named '_ssl'

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ran 1 test in 0.005s

FAILED (errors=1)

Error: a unit test failed, please do one of:

export DEBUGCPPUNIT=TRUE # for exception catching
export CPPUNITTRACE="gdb --args" # for interactive debugging on Linux
export VALGRIND=memcheck # for memory checking

and retry using: make PythonTest_pyuno_pytests_ssl

/root/libreoffice-5.0.0.2/solenv/gbuild/PythonTest.mk:38: recipe for target '/root/libreoffice-5.0.0.2/workdir/PythonTest/pyuno_pytests_ssl/done' failed
make[1]: *** [/root/libreoffice-5.0.0.2/workdir/PythonTest/pyuno_pytests_ssl/done] Error 1
Makefile:247: recipe for target 'build' failed

Often I find this is due to a circular dependency within several packages. What I've started to do is when I grab a copy of the book, I take notes on packages I will need to rebuild to resolve every dependency possible. This way once I have a completed system, I can further tune things.

I've gotten LibreOffice to build, but yes, it requires a lot of building and rebuilding.

Can you run:

and post the output?

I have never gotton libre office to build against the system python I always have to add '--enable-python=internal' to the configfure.

Rebuild Python(,s) after OpenSSL has been installed.

I tried the last suggestion which is to rebuild Python(s) and that worked. Wow, that was a long compile for libreOffice. I've never seen this program before and it looks amazing!

Reaper, the output to "whereis libcups" is libcups:
That's odd. It should be installed. I'll have to look into this.

Thanks you so much everyone for your help!