Re: generating pc file

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Fri, 21 Sep 2012, David A. Wheeler wrote:

> Bob Friesenhahn:
> > Yes.  The only make-time override which has any business being used as
> > part of a formal build process is DESTDIR used with 'make install'.
> > Anything else is a hack. :-)
>
> You may think so, but this capability is a clearly-documented promised 
> capability under the GNU standards.

It may be a promised capability, but there are no formal tests for it, 
and hardly any projects would think to add such tests.  Anything which 
is not specifically periodically tested is usually broken.

The common Automake 'make distcheck' test does not verify that the 
project correctly obeys the many make/environment variables which 
might be specified.  The only make/shell variable it verifies is 
DESTDIR.

Projects often break other standard capabilities as well.  For 
example, a great many projects (including highest-profile GNU 
projects) break the function of specifying parameters like CFLAGS, 
LDFLAGS, CPPFLAGS to configure as described in the standard INSTALL 
file.  To me, failing to support a configure-time specification is 
worse than failing to support an over-ride specified at make time via 
an environment variable or make argument.

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