[bug #50928] configure should fail if "--with-x" given but can't be honored

[Ingo Schwarze]

Follow-up Comment #2, bug #50928 (project groff):

Please close this bug report as invalid.

The GNU Coding Standards say in Section 7.1 "How Configuration Should Work":

https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Configuration.html

All configure scripts should accept all of the “detail” options and the
variable settings, whether or not they make any difference to the particular
package at hand. In particular, they should accept any option that starts with
‘--with-’ or ‘--enable-’. This is so users will be able to configure
an entire GNU source tree at once with a single set of options.

End of citation.

That means Bertrand's difficulties when trying to change the behaviour are not
a limitation of autoconf(1), but changing that behaviour is intentionally
unsupported.

I believe a core GNU project might not want to gratuitiously diverge from the
GNU Coding Standards in a question of interoperability of this kind.  Besides,
this convention is also used elsewhere.  For example, the OpenBSD ports tree
assumes that --with-... arguments can be given to GNU configure scripts and
will simply be ignored if unsupported by the particu[ar program in question.

So changing this established behaviour might easily cause porting headaches
even on non-GNU systems.

    _______________________________________________________

Reply to this item at:

  <http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?50928>

_______________________________________________
  Message sent via/by Savannah
  http://savannah.gnu.org/