distro-configs files, autogen.sh options, defaults etc

[Lubos Lunak]

On Tuesday 24 of April 2012, Caolán McNamara wrote:
> On Tue, 2012-04-24 at 10:31 +0200, Tomáš Chvátal wrote:
> > All switches are by default on enable state and we check for the deps.
> > If the damn deps are not present on the system we switch the feature
> > off.
>
> Some packages do this,

 Isn't that more like "most packages", actually?

> and it leads to the nightmare situation that you 
> silently get a different result depending on what packages you happen to
> install. So you have loads of stuff installed locally and you get one
> result. You build it through mock with only exactly the packages
> required to fulfill every component in the dependency tree and you get a
> different result. If something you depend on itself pulls in a new
> dependency in a point release of itself, which happens to be something
> LibreOffice could use, but didn't before, then you get a completely new
> configuration because say gtk decided to depend on graphite and you flip
> functionality between builds, *shudder*.

 Yes, but who cares? Nobody except for possibly some of those 10 packages, who 
can be explicit about the options if they really want. Right now all those 
100 developers have to have a long list of options, half of them because they 
are needed, other half because they'd prefer not to build repeatedly stuff 
they already have installed. I still remember doing my very first build when 
I asked how do I do the build and was handed thiiis long list of options 
*shudder*.

> Nah, just pick a default configuration and everyone gets the same one
> (within reason) when they do "./autogen.sh"

 Besides, this is discussing a problem which has a reasonably simple technical 
solution. It would be enough if --enable-system-libs=auto existed and was the 
default. Bonus points if configure at the end printed a list of which 
external dependencies were and were not picked up.

-- 
 Lubos Lunak
 l.lunak at suse.cz