On Sat, 7 Jul 2001, Stefan van der Eijk 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
> >
> Then the developer would need to put that in the .spec file --> %configure
>
> --definitely-use-libtiff
>
>
> Why not then put in a BuildRequires libtiff-devel?
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.
The problem with the last two methods (which I didn't generally approve of
in the first palce, regardless of rpm), is the fact that rpm --requires
will miss this.
This is why I wrote recently about missing BuildRequires in xchat. You'd
never catch them, because if you built the package without a particular
dependency installed (say without python), it would build fine.
This is relatively harmless if you build from the src rpm, but for a user
installing the binary rpm, rpm warns him that he needs python, because the
person who originally built the rpm had python on his system, even if he
didn't note this in either one of Requires or BuildRequires.
Again, this is an argument for being careful and doing the dependencies by
hand. The only sure way to catch it is to start installing rpms with urpmi
on a bare system as Stefan is doing, and as I hhave done in the past.
--
Sincerely,
David Walluck
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
