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

[Petr Mladek]

Lubos Lunak píše v Út 24. 04. 2012 v 17:16 +0200:
> On Tuesday 24 of April 2012, Caolán McNamara wrote:
> > On Tue, 2012-04-24 at 11:49 +0200, Lubos Lunak wrote:
> > > 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 don't really get why developers are using vast long lists of options.
> > ./autogen.sh
> > + a few dev-mode options like werror, dbgutil or debug seems to make
> > sense
> > ./autogen.sh --with-system-libs if people want to skip building stuff
> > they have installed already

My understanding is that --with-system-libs forces almost all stuff to
be from the system. IMHO, normal developers should not use it. It is
handy for packagers that want to make sure that they use as most system
libraries as possible. It saves the size of package and makes the
security updates easier.

IMHO, if you do not use --with-system-libs, it tries to use the most
typical libraries from system to safe the build time. So, it should give
good results for developers.

If ./autogen.sh without options does not work well, we might discuss
particular defaults. I just wonder what exactly normal developers
explicitly enable/disable.


>  But that doesn't work, that's the point.
> 
>  Running "./autogen.sh --with-system-libs" fails as soon as it finds one 
> external library that does not exist system-wide (and there's pretty much 
> bound to be one, given what all kinds of libs we use). So one has to try, 
> fail, add one --without-system-foo, and repeat until it builds. And try again 
> with next distro upgrade, or carry a growing list of options.

Well, this is typical also for other software. You usually need to
install several devel packages to make configure happy. Maybe, it was
not problem with KDE but there was the nice "KDE development" package
selection on openSUSE ;-)

Hmm, the was discussed the auto mode. I see two possibilities here:

1. It might enable only features that you could build with your system
   libraries. It might be good that it does not force some stuff if you
   could not build it. On the other hand, it might enable stuff that you
   do not need.

   I do not like it because it is hard to predict what you get. It might
   be more complicated to support all the poor developers with their
   problems.


2. The result of auto mode might be the same set of default features. It
   might just prefer the system stuff when possible and use the internal
   libraries otherwise.

   I kind of like this approach. It might be used to solve the current
   problems with ./autogen.sh without any parameters :-)


Best Regards,
Petr