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On Sun, 8 Jul 2001, David Walluck wrote:
>>>This is really a flaw in the GNU configure mechanism. It would be nice
>>>if autoconf's configure scripts allowed you to say:
>>>
>>>% ./configure --definitely-use-libtiff
>First of all, it is not a problem with rpm %configure, but a potential
>problem with configure.in scripts. When I write autoconf scripts, I always
>AC_MSG_ERROR on a missing package, some people just AC_MSG_WARN, others
>just assume you don't want it to be supported if this feature is optional.
But we can't expect the package authors to change their configure
scripts just for Mandrake. To take XEmacs for an example, the configure
script will leave out PNG and TIFF support if the libraries are not
there. This is a useful feature if you just want to get the package
built on your AIX, Solaris or Windows box, and I don't think the XEmacs
developers would want to annoy their users by changing to AC_MSG_ERROR.
But such behaviour is not a good idea for building RPMs, as we've
discussed. So should the RPM packager change the configure script to
AC_MSG_ERROR? Should we distribute a patch file for configure.in as
part of the source package?
I think that is too cumbersome. It would be better if configure had an
option at run time to change all AC_MSG_WARNs to AC_MSG_ERRORs, apart
from any that you explicitly say to not worry about.
- --
Ed Avis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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