Dear developers, dear Jim, Karel has pointed me to the new options of coreutils' configure: --enable-install-program=PROG_LIST install the programs in PROG_LIST (comma-separated, default: none) --enable-no-install-program=PROG_LIST do NOT install the programs in PROG_LIST (comma-separated, default: arch hostname su)
A few comments: 0) I would call it --ena...-programs, i.e., with plural at the end, as it seems to match the meaning better. 1) --enable-no-install-program ... default: arch hostname su No, this is not the default value of this option. The dafault value would have to use commas, not spaces, as separators. More importantly, if this were the default value, then --enable-no-install-program=hostname,su would be a slight modification of the default, so it would behave almost as the default, with the only difference that "arch" is installed. This is not what your code does. "arch hostname su" is the set of programs which are not installed by default. It should be documented somewhere, but it may be outside ./configure --help. 2) The set of programs that are not installed by default is specified on two places: configure.ac and src/Makefile.am. configure checks that the two match, each time a user builds coreutils.. I cannot agree with this. I believe the solution is to have one primary source definig the set. There are several ways to achieve that: 2a) src/Makefile.am might be the primary source. configure.ac would contains something like: m4_include(excluded.m4) gl_INCLUDE_EXCLUDE_PROG([optional_bin_progs], EXCLUDED_BY_DEFAULT) while excluded.m4 would contain: m4_define([EXCLUDED_BY_DEFAULT], [arch hostname su]) excluded.m4 would be generated from src/Makefile.am, by a rule declared in Makefile.am 2b) Vice versa: configure.ac would be the primary source, and src/Makefile.am would contain: include $(top_srcdir)/excluded.am which would be generated from configure.ac by a rule in Makefile.am 2c) It should also be possible to create a separate file, excluded.magic, which would get included by both configure.ac and src/Makefile.am. It would be a bit tricky, though. I could write a patch for 2), but I think that the answer to 1) might make it irrelevant, so I'm not rushing in... Hope you find these comments interesting, Stepan _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list Bug-coreutils@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils