One of the outstanding issues in ./configure has been the dependence on
standalone bash scripts for detecting whether a helper is able to build
or not.
The problem is that they are standalone so we cannot re-use test results
already existing in configure.ac in the scripts and vice-versa.
We also encounter some errors (as seen in the bugs about SASL location)
as a side effect of different tests being run.
To resolve this I propose changing the config.test files into small M4
scriptlets which can be included directly into configure at bootstrap time.
Pros:
* we gain a huge amount of information from existing configure.ac tests
* we gain ability to run autoconf checks in the test scriptlets
* we can push test results back to the main configure.ac cache from
the scriptlets for faster overall process
Cons:
* we lose the ability to drop-in third party helpers and build as if
they were part of the Squid sources.
However I am not aware of any downstream distro packagers actually
making use of this ability so it should not be a big loss.
Opinions?
Amos
