>> If anything, I'd suggest that the presence of this flag represents a >> minor, cosmetic bug which one could file against the GNU autotools.
> That may not be minor .. Autoconf is loaded with irrelevant checks. > If one of them fails, and prevents it from building, when nothing is > really wrong, that is a major bug. Autoconf-generated configure scripts are horrible, horrible beasts. They are security disasters waiting to happen (they are almost perfect trojaning targets - mind-numbing to vet manually, very hard to sandbox, far harder than programs to vet mechanically, and, worst of all, they are training people to blindly run them). And, when they get something wrong, they are hell to fix. At work I recently had occasion to try to set up amanda 2.6.1 on NetBSD 4.0.1. amanda needed glib, which in turn needed pkg-config. Each of these three uses an autoconf-generated configure script. pkg-config's configure script produced a syntax error complaint from sh. glib's configure script broke because it tested statfs(), found that we had such a routine somewhere it could link to, and jumped to the (incorrect) conclusion that we had the full API. (statfs() is present for ABI compatability; the API is not present.) Then, based on that, it tried to figure out how many arguments it takes, which failed because the API isn't there, and fell over hard. Then, amanda's configure script broke trying to figure out GNU tar and smbclient, apparently because of shell quoting bugs in the script. (I ran into plenty of other problems too, but they aren't relevant to configure scripts.) That's three for three where I had to edit the configure script to make it even run to completion, never mind actually getting things right. No, when I run into something that uses configure scripts, I almost always throw it into /dev/null and look for alternatives. (Amanda I was being paid to struggle with, and even then I insisted on pushing the decision to ignore the security nightmare upstairs from me. If it had been for my own machines, fugeddaboutit.) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user