Hello autoconf Wizards, SUGGESTION: (1) Add a built-in configure option, call it --enable-option-checking (or whatever suits you), that will turn on complaining about --with-package and -enable-feature options that are not supported. Or maybe one option for each if you must.
(2) Also or in addition: add a autoconf function AC_OPTION_CHECKING (or other name) so that the autoconf user who is making a software package using autoconf can decide whither to have option-checking turned on or off by default. I believe that this is a "better" approach. Your current documentation implicitly asks (see below) for this suggestion. So here it is. cheers lance from: http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/autoconf.html#External-Software configure scripts do not complain about --with-package options that they do not support. This behavior permits configuring a source tree containing multiple packages with a top-level configure script when the packages support different options, without spurious error messages about options that some of the packages support. An unfortunate side effect is that option spelling errors are not diagnosed. No better approach to this problem has been suggested so far. from: http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/autoconf.html#Package-Options configure scripts do not complain about --enable-feature options that they do not support. This behavior permits configuring a source tree containing multiple packages with a top-level configure script when the packages support different options, without spurious error messages about options that some of the packages support. An unfortunate side effect is that option spelling errors are not diagnosed. No better approach to this problem has been suggested so far.
