On Tue Apr 10 01:45:31 2007, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Configure should act as though writing --foo=no is false instead of > true. Tonight I tried using --execcapable=no to get around a compile > failure, but then realized that it would probably treat "no" as a true > value. >
I discussed this ticket with other participants in the recent hackathon in Toronto. I am inclined to recommend that we not make any changes in Configure.pl's behavior as implied by the ticket, for a number of reasons: 1. Configure.pl is a Perl script. The truth value of the string 'no' in Perl is true. Cet. par., in Perl if you want to negate something you 'undef' it or you assign it a value of 0 (or the string '0'). So the current behavior of the 'execcapable' option is consistent with Perl's customary behavior. 2. In config/auto/jit.pm, $execcapable is set to 1 for Unix-ish operating systems and Windows and set to 0 for other OSes. But if you want to set a different behavior, it appears to me that you can simply pass a value of 1 or 0 to the execcapable option. 3. If we really thought we'd make extensive use of something equivalent to '-- execcapable=no', we could create a '--noexeccapable' option analogous to '-- nomanicheck' (see lib/Parrot/Configure/Options.pm). 4. AFAICT from looking at Perl 5's Configure.sh, Perl 5 survives without a 'no' value for any of its configuration options. In short, YAGNI. What do others think? kid51
