On Wed, Feb 12, 2020 at 05:08:06PM -0500, Philippe Blain wrote: > Is there a way to force the configure script to error out if it does > not find curl (or any one of the optional dependencies that I happen > to need for my build?) I don't think so. It would probably be possible for configure.ac to behave this way. Looking at the code, I think GIT_PARSE_WITH would have to record the affirmative for "--with" instead of just canceling a previous "--without", and then the part that does curl auto-detection would need to complain if it doesn't find curl at that point. But our use of autoconf is not very extensive, and in fact most developers do not use it at all. If you know you want curl, you're better off just overriding it explicitly with the Makefile knob: make NO_CURL= or: echo NO_CURL= >>config.mak make Either of those will override the NO_CURL setting done by the configure script (you can see the full list of knobs set by configure in config.mak.autogen). -Peff