Hi, 2012/3/16 Alon Bar-Lev <alon.bar...@gmail.com>: > If we do not want to do auto detection, enabling optional components > may lead to configure failure, and force the user to explicitly > disable this feature. > > It is possible, and I don't mind so much, however, I prefer configure > to use the minimum absolutely needed components by default, and in > majority of valid cases succeed. > > Disabling by default does not effect users nor building via build > script nor building via package management (rpmbuild, deb). It only > effects people who build manually from sources.
In my opinion, the build defaults should reflect what the project considers as the recommended defaults - the features we want to see in every typical OpenVPN server and client. Apart from the Windows-binaries, the _source_ is the relevant artefact that gets released as official "OpenVPN" and therefore the defaults in the build system are important. If we want to avoid confusing compile-time errors, we should present useful and informative warnings to the user at configure-time: "Could not find library X, if you want to compile without support for X, pass --disable-X" or something similar. No need to hide this from the user. (I haven't looked at the build system, so this type of error message might already be present.) While building a piece of software I often notice additional dependencies based on what configure tells me. This then causes me to install additional dev-packages / libraries before continuing compilation. If we simply cut down the dependencies I'd probably notice a missing feature much later, e.g. while debugging connection problems... The usual $ ./configure $ make $ make install ... should hold as few surprises as possible, IMHO. Cheers Fabian
