Re: infrastructure for suggested/required packages, and better error reporting

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Sat, 31 Jul 2010, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> 1) Autoconf should have macros for delayed error reporting.
> Example: wget foo-1.tar.gz, run configure, find out it needs bar.
> Install bar, only to find out foo also needs baz, etc.
>
> So, we should have something that allows an error message but also
> continues the configure script in search for other possible errors,
> and summarizes the suggestions and errors at the end.

Library dependencies often behave like a pyramid so the first failure 
is often likely to cause all of the other tests to fail.

What is sorely lacking from Autotools is a proper way to determine 
library dependencies.  Many packages uses pkg-config for this purpose, 
but it becomes quite unreliable in complex situations.  If libtool .la 
files were not deleted, then the configure script would have a way to 
query and determine the actual dependencies.

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