Re: inadvisable to have configure script send me an email when user runs it?

[Eric Blake]

On 10/18/2010 01:29 PM, Ed Hartnett wrote:
> I thought I would add a --disable-unidata-email parameter to disable the
> email attempt. (Which I would use myself with nightly testing.)

Rather than making automatic email built in to your configure script 
(which would indeed be unusual, and IMHO violates the principle of least 
surprise, particularly for someone running configure behind a firewall 
where you should be able to build software without external network 
access), have you instead considered just using autobuild and requesting 
that users contribute their results to an autobuild collection email 
address?  http://josefsson.org/autobuild/

In other words, while it is a nice goal to request user feedback, the 
onus for providing that feedback should be on the user, rather than 
forced on them by the configure script; but the configure script can 
make it easier by providing sufficient output to make it very easy to 
collect reported results.  Several GNU projects are using autobuild to 
increase their coverage of successful and failed build reports across a 
large number of systems.  If you still want to add such functionality 
directly into your configure script, then may I at least suggest that 
you default it to off rather than on, so that you only trigger outgoing 
mail when explicitly requested by the user.

--
Eric Blake   address@hidden    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org