On Tue, 22 Feb 2005, Thomas Dickey wrote:
On Tue, 22 Feb 2005, Hugh Sasse Staff Elec Eng wrote:
A few weeks ago I wrote to the Gnu coding standards people, with a suggestion that there should be a DEPENDENCIES file, so that
It would be nice if autoconf did that for itself. I don't recall a "recent" release which satisfied that goal (and noted that problem on this mailing list several times without seeing any result).
Autoconf has no way to know anything about a "package". It works by executing the compiler/linker so it only tests the cumulative result of installing "packages".
There is the potential for using a DEPENDENCIES file to display intelligent error messages. For example, failure to find a header or library could trigger a semi-intelligent message suggesting that maybe the associated package needs to be installed or updated. The suggestion message could be totally wrong though, since failure to detect a header or library could actually be due to an earlier error in the configuration process (config.log needs to be carefully inspected).
In many cases, the same header files or libraries may be delivered by multiple packages, which could be confusing.
Bob ====================================== Bob Friesenhahn bfriesen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/ GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
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