Re: installation instructions on OpenBSD and FreeBSD

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Thursday, March 15, 2001 at 20:19:52 (+0100), Marc Espie wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: installation instructions on OpenBSD and FreeBSD
>
> I wrote:
> > Marc> I don't have any objection to guessing at -I/usr/local/include
> > Marc> and -L/usr/local/lib on BSDs...
> 
> Actually, I have one reservation. This MUST be overridable by the 
> person running configure.
> 
> In the first place, we do want to be able to build the system without
> getting influenced by what is in /usr/local... if configure gets smarter
> and starts outguessing us, then we're back where we started, and we
> can't build clean systems in a reproducable way (because configure will
> find out a tk that's in /usr/local, say, and start building gdb with tk
> support, which is mostly fine, except that the base system doesn't ship
> with tk, or some such thing).

Indeed.  It's already a very major pain to try to convince a GNU
Autoconf configured package to build cleanly and predictably within the
context of any of the *BSD ports/pkgsrc systems.  Often the modules in
these systems resort to patching the configure script so that it won't
find things that it's not told to find.

> This is very important. Having automatic guessing and not having such
> a switch would mean all BSDs would have to patch configure before importing
> stuff into their respective trees, and all three systems developpers would
> get angry at me for making such a half-baked suggestion in the first
> place... :)
 
I couldn't agree more.

Strictly speaking such systems as the *BSD ports/pkgsrc should not be
running the configure but should instead have pre-canned configurations
ready to use.

Configure is just too damn smart for any package building system,
particularly when the goal is to build binary installable packages!
Configure ends up having very bad SCM hygiene in these scenarios.

Unfortunately building canned configurations that are adjustable in
minor ways (eg. path prefixes, etc.) is very hard to do.  Perhaps if
Autoconf offered some way to build intermediate configurations that
still allowed some further configuration to be done at a later time then
things would be a bit simpler to manage.

-- 
                                                        Greg A. Woods

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