+++ Eric Blake [2013-05-20 09:11 -0600]: > On 05/20/2013 09:01 AM, Paul Wise wrote: > > On Mon, 2013-05-20 at 08:37 -0600, Eric Blake wrote: > > > >> I would MUCH rather see us honor a CONFIG_GUESS and CONFIG_SUB > >> environment variable, rather than baking in a PATH search. This topic > >> has come up in the past, where I made the same request back then. > > > > The patch does both and both are needed AFAICT. > > I disagree. Env-var override should be sufficient, without needing any > PATH probing. The problem with this in the context of distro buildds was explained in this sub-part of the thread from Oct last year: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.sysutils.autoconf.general/14756 ENV VARS are carefully filtered out of buildd environments in order to get clean builds. We really want a mechanism where the distro default build just looks in the right (system) place, unless you ask for something different. Now it probably is possible to get this ENV VAR set in buildd environments, but what if the cmake, maven, ant, scons and $everybody else also insist on the same mechanism for default builds to work properly? That's a lot of ENV VARS - it doesn't scale well. And if someone does a local build outside the buildd environment now they have to remember to set these variables too, otherwise suddenly stuff that built on the buildds doesn't build for them. ENV VARS are very useful for all sorts of things, but they are problematic for distro build defaults, so there is a good reason for the path walk. Now we could patch autoconf in Debian (and other distros patch it too) to deal with this, but the whole point of this excercise is to fix this upstream so that over time the problem will just fade into history. Wookey -- Principal hats: Linaro, Emdebian, Wookware, Balloonboard, ARM http://wookware.org/ _______________________________________________ Autoconf mailing list Autoconf@xxxxxxx https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/autoconf
