On Oct 21, 2012, at 7:44 PM, Fred Gleason <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Oct 21, 2012, at 20:13 16, Gregg Wonderly wrote:
>
>> In those cases, the right heuristic would either find the answer, or stop
>> and prompt for the directory.
>
> Stopping and prompting isn't an option, not in a make target. That process
> (as well as 'configure') are designed to be driven by automated systems like
> rpmbuild(1); there is an explicit design requirement that they *not* require
> user input after being started.
I've used many different configure scripts and makefiles over the past couple
of decades which have in fact asked me for a distro specific path because they
could not devine that information. In this day and age, I think that moving
beyond the old behavior and use of specific toolsets could be a good thing.
There are many old ways of conditionalizing background execution of things like
just doing
if [ ! -t 1 -a ! -t 0 ]; then
echo "Cannot determine where apache is installed at" >&2
exit 2;
else
echo -n "Input path for apache installation: (/etc/httpd) "
read dir
if [ "$dir" = "" ]; then
dir=/etc/httpd
fi
fi
which makes it work better in the case of running at a terminal connection, but
still do something functionally the same when run in the background.
> While I suppose it could be possible to craft yet another script that
> calculates this information in a manner that could be passed to 'configure',
> the more I think about it the less I like it. Beyond the fact that we are
> really at the point of diminishing returns here, remember that this is
> configuration data that we are talking about (as opposed to software
> components proper); hence, a good argument could be made that it *shouldn't*
> be installed automatically (and perhaps inadvertently overwrite a custom
> configuration). There are many other FOSS packages that follow precisely
> this policy WRT to configuration data; MySQL and Samba are two that come to
> mind immediately.
Because I had to figure this out, I was only slightly worried about it from a
documentation perspective. But when I saw some other posts on the list about
it, I though well, this seems like a fixable issue. If it's really just not a
problem because you feel that everyone is not going to be building from source,
by and large, then so be it. Not a giant deal for me.
Gregg Wonderly
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