On Apr 1, 2006, at 16:37, Tom Lane wrote:

Just to clarify my point: what'd make sense to me is to describe this
generic autoconf behavior, and maybe include a small table listing some of the more-likely-to-be-useful variables. ("configure --help" already does that, on a very small scale.) It doesn't make much sense to me to document two specific variables in a way that fails to draw the reader's
attention to the fact that there are many other ones.  After all, the
reader might have some other problem to solve than "use this perl". If
he knows that there might be a way to solve it by setting a variable,
he's ahead of the game.

Agreed. I've started with this, at least, in ./configure --help

*** configure   06 Mar 2006 09:41:42 -0800      1.485
--- configure   03 Apr 2006 12:41:47 -0700      
***************
*** 907,912 ****
--- 907,915 ----
    LDFLAGS_SL
    DOCBOOKSTYLE
                location of DocBook stylesheets
+   PERL        location of perl executable
+   PYTHON      location of python executable
+   TCL         location of tcl executable

Use these variables to override the choices made by `configure' or to help
  it to find libraries and programs with nonstandard names/locations.

But I'm not sure what other variables are supported. I'd *really* like to know, for example, if there's a READLINE variable, so that I can point it at GNU readline instead of Mac OS X's crappy readline. And are there also variables for tclconfig, krb5, pam, ldap, bonjour, openssl, zlib, and ld? And if so, what do they point at, since some of these are not execurables (e.g., readline)?

I'll submit a more complete patch, along with a patch to INSTALL, once I get a more complete list via replies to the above questions from you kind folks.

Thanks!

David


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