Packages building without the proper options (Was: Getting ant and kaffe to play nice

[Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer@pasteur.fr>]

On Wednesday 8 November 2000, at 15 h 29, the keyboard of "Ean R . Schuessler" 
<ean@brainfood.com> wrote:

> There are a number of features (including even X AWT GUI support) that are
> silently disabled during the Kaffe build if you do not have the proper header
> files installed. 

This is a very common problem when recompiling packages, wether for porting to another architecture or for using them on an older Debian version: most upstream programs silently fallback when an option you requested is not available. For instance, you './configure --enable-ssl' and, if you don't have OpenSSL, the package quietly builds without SSL and you get bug reports :-(

I would say the problem is upstream: a configure-style program should die when an option is requested but cannot be implemented. But most configure.in do not check.