Hi, I've been a user of GNU autoconf (and automake) for many years and find it pretty easy to use most of the time. Two areas, though, have always been somewhat of a problem with autoconf for me as a user: 1. Documentation of the options to pass to configure. This is not really a problem with the autoconf tool -- the package developers need to do a better job at documenting the options. Perhaps autoconf could provide more in this area, but that's not what I'm after in this email. 2. More importantly, there is no real standard to the package installation process from an administrators perspective. After I've done the usual "configure; make; make install;" to install the package and then remove the source code, I later have little to tell me what the results of the 'configure' or 'make' commands were. This can make it difficult to answer the question like "which compiler/linker/library version was used?" What I'd like to see as a standard part of the output of 'configure' is a Makefile with a "post-install" step that, as part of the standard, copies the results of configure (config.log and config.status) to (one of) the standard locations for the install (probably datadir). As mentioned above, this would help administrators in determining how tools in their environment were configured and installed (particularly when they were installed by one of the previous administrators). If this is something that developers have to put in themselves, then many different things could result, so it would be much better if there was a standard for this information to be put into where the package is installed and, I think, autoconf should be one of the places where that standard is implemented and followed. Does it make sense why I see this as important and why I think it should be implemented in the autoconf tools? David Masterson
BEGIN:VCARD VERSION:2.1 N:Masterson;David FN:David Masterson (damaster) ORG:Cisco Systems, Inc.;020020450 TITLE:Software Engineer TEL;WORK;VOICE:+1 408 525 4673 TEL;CELL;VOICE:+1 408 660 6494 ADR;WORK:;F8-8;210 West Tasman Drive;SAN JOSE;CALIFORNIA;95134 LABEL;WORK;ENCODING=QUOTED-PRINTABLE:F8-8=0D=0A210 West Tasman Drive=0D=0ASAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA 95134 EMAIL;PREF;INTERNET:damaster@xxxxxxxxx REV:20071003T235508Z END:VCARD
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