Re: autoconf/configure information sources?
Dale Scheetz <dwarf@polaris.net> writes:
> I've clearly found someone who "knows something" ;-)
I'm merely an autoconf apprentice....
> Ahh! I didn't realize this was an "added feature" by the author...
Yup. In general, the autoconf philosophy is that it's fully
automated, so I figured that this was author-added. Some digging
through configure.in showed where it was done.
>> * Ask upstream to put this stuff in configure flags (ie,
>> --enable-crash-menu)
>>
> Can you expand on this a bit? (I'm just too ignorant to follow your logic)
Sure. All of the questions asked should have command-line
equivalents. Ie, instead of asking whether you should enable the
crash menu, they should use something like
AC_ARG_ENABLE(CRASH_MENU, Whether we should enable the crash menu,
....
which would add a command-line argument to configure. When
configuring, instead of being asked these questions, you'd construct a
configure command line like
./configure --enable-crash-menu --disable-compile-palette ....
That would be the most autoconfy way to do things like this.
It may be that the upstream really wants to ask questions, so instead
you could lobby for some kind of "configure config file" or something,
that the debian packaging could put into place before running
configure. This would require changes to their ASK_FEATURE macro.
With a few changes, you could probably make it work by using
config.cache and a modified macro, but it's really best if upstream
were to help with this, so you don't have to do any messing in the
future.
--
Alan Shutko <ats@acm.org> - In a variety of flavors!
A little experience often upsets a lot of theory.
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