On 03/19/2012 09:32 AM, Ralf Corsepius wrote: > On 03/19/2012 04:16 PM, Eric Blake wrote: > >> Meta-question: Why are you disabling option-checking in the first place? >> It's contrary to GNU Coding Standards (the ability to disable option >> checking is provided for non-GNU packages, but doesn't get as much >> testing because GNU packages shouldn't be using it in the first place). I think I used poor wording here; my intent was to state that the ability to reject unknown options is something provided for non-GNU packages, but that GNU packages should not be using the ability to reject unknown options in the first place. > > Option checking presumes all config-subdirs configure scripts are > accepting the same set of configure-options. > > This doesn't always apply and even less applies in cases of optional > config-subdirs, esp. in cases when config-subdirs originate from > different origins and are being treated as optional drop-in packages. I think we're in violent agreement here. GNU Coding Standards state that packages must silently ignore unknown options. Therefore, enabling option checking (as a way to diagnose typos) is a violation of GCS. Autoconf allows the ability to enable option-checking at the top level for non-GNU packages, but the reason that you cannot re-enable option checking after default-disablement is because autoconf cannot guarantee that subdirs will behave correctly with option checking enabled. Meanwhile, the mentioned hack of explicitly adding (and rejecting) just the one commonly mis-spelled option, rather than all mis-spelled options in general, can be argued to fit within the GCS - you are explicitly recognizing a specific spelling and therefore it is no longer an unknown option, while you continue to silently ignore all other unknown options. -- Eric Blake eblake@xxxxxxxxxx +1-919-301-3266 Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org
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