Re: [nmh-workers] Handling empty components

[Ken Hornstein]

>For example, build_nmh is failing during the "configuring" step
>because one of the checks, which builds a small program that
>includes "gdbm-ndbm.h", fails because that include file is no
>longer provided with the libgdbm-dev package (only "gdbm.h" is).
>Thus, even the "configure" script under the 1.7.1-4 tree on
>sources.debian.org would fail at this point (because it is
>expecting "gdbm/ndbm.h").

Arrrghhhh.

I do not understand why it is so hard to get a working dbm library on
Linux, but it seems to be our biggest build problem by far on that
platform.  To add insult to injury, we only need the dbm library for
a tiny feature that I suspect 90% of nmh users don't even use (and that
I personally think we shouldn't even have).

What do people think of making this a soft failure; if you can't find
a working dbm library, then the feature simply doesn't get enabled?
(the particular feature that uses dbm is duplicate message suppression
in slocal).  This would let us make the autoconf code a lot simpler as
well.

--Ken