On Wed, 13 Dec 2006, Steven G. Johnson wrote:
Something that has been bothering me for a long time has been Autoconf's lack
of checking for command-line options. That is, it doesn't give any error, or
even a warning, if the user accidentally types --with-foo or --enable-ffoo
instead of --enable-foo. In my experience, this has caused numerous problems
because users think they've enabled things when they haven't. (Heck, it's
burned me several times on my own programs!)
Not only is it unfriendly, it's also unexpected: virtually every other Unix
command-line program complains if you pass it an unknown argument.
The reason why Autoconf behaves this way is that it is supposed to be
possible to extract several different independently-maintained
projects in a directory and drive them all via top configure script.
The sub-projects might not use the same version of Autoconf and will
surely accept different configuration options. A package maintainer
may not know that his package is built subordinate to some other
developer's package.
This approach was historically used for the GNU tool set.
Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
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