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 17:16 +0200, Lubos Lunak wrote:
> >  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)
>
> Aha, so I suspect this boils down to "someone put clucene into the
> default list of with-system-libs", right :-) ?

 No, I do have usable CLucene installed. It boils down to "I have to manually 
list all libs I don't want to use from system, or all libs I do want to use 
from system, or I have to keep rebuilding the bundled copies all the time".

 Re-reading the thread again, it seems to me we're talking about two slightly 
different things. What you want is that configure by default builds with the 
same set of features enabled, regardless of what system libs are enabled. 
Which is the case now, and it is solved by using internal copies of almost 
all external libraries. What I want is that configure by default (or at least 
easily) uses as many system libs as possible, so that it is not necessary to 
keep rebuilding them. That does not conflict with what you want, and that 
also does not work now, because in practice one has to manually check every 
single library and enable/disable one set of them.

 Is there any reasonable use case for preferring almost all internal copies of 
libraries if the system-wide one is suitable? To me it looks like all that 
would be needed is making all the --with-system-* options by default work 
like 'auto', which would mean using the system library if it is considered 
suitable, otherwise use the internal copy. That way the feature set would be 
constant, by default developers would get all systems libs they have 
available used, Petr would keep using --with-system-libs to use all system 
libs except those he has disabled and get a failure if some are not present, 
and everybody could tweak what gets used with --with-system-foo if (and only 
if) wanted.

 Does somebody see a problem with that? Otherwise I'll do this change or 
create an easy hack for it.

-- 
 Lubos Lunak
 l.lunak at suse.cz