On 04/25/2013 04:49 AM, Miles Bader wrote: > The current _user-interface_ ("./configure ...ARGS...; make") also has > the advantage of making it pretty clear where one specifies > configuration options, and retaining those options during normal > rebuilds. > > [SNIP] > To add my 2 cents to all that has been said so far (with which I basically agree): in the long term, it *might* be nice to move some configuration steps at make runtime, in order to take advantage of make parallelism and automatic dependency resolution. With that, one could run:
$ make config && make instead of $ ./configure && make But that is IMO not just a patch/hack that can be added on top of the autotools; it would require careful design, extensive testing, a transition plan ("I do I convert my project from 'configure' to 'make config'?") and a way to get proper user feedback (especially from "power users" and distro packagers) before finalizing APIs and design. I fear no-one in the Autotools community has the time to commit to such a work ATM. > With a "make-only" approach, where do I specify configuration options? > "make OPT1=yes ..."? If so, do I need to re-specify those arguments > every time I invoke make? If not (if they're somehow magically > recorded somewhere), do options specified to different make > invocations accumulate? If so, how do I reset them? ...etc etc... > > The configure/build split actually seems pretty useful... > Indeed. Albeit the all-or-nothing nature of configure is quite an annoyance, and sometimes a burden. Sure, caching and the possibility to preset configuration variables help a lot there, but that is more a (well-working) band-aid than a proper long-term solution, IMVHO. > [Having a way of making a "default" configure happen automatically if > one just does make without configure would be useful, I suppose, but > that probably just needs a trivial little Makefile which get > overwritten by configure.] > > -miles > Regards, Stefano