Re: Autoconf and apt

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Tue, 19 Aug 2008, Allan Clark wrote:
> I therefore urge you to reconsider using existing resources for more common
> cases rather than serial dependencies on new, undiscovered data and 100%
> coverage which might be too difficult to reach.

You are optimizing the special case where dependencies are to be 
installed from "packages" but this package is configured via a 
configure script.  Most users who install packages install "packages" 
prepared by someone else and never run a configure script.  They might 
not even have a working compiler installed on their system.

Perhaps what is needed is a new "--list-dependencies" option which 
prints prepared text listing the possible dependencies of this 
package.  It is not clear how well this will work though since many 
Linux developers do not know the dependencies of their own software. 
They just expect these dependencies to be automatically available as 
part of the Linux distribution.

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/