Re: configure's --without flags do the opposite

[Dr . Jürgen Sauermann]

    Hi Marco,
      
      currently --without-XXX is not properly supported in GNU
      APL's configure.ac.
      
      The effect of --without-XXX can be achieved though by not
      using --with-XXX,
    and the --with-XXX arguments are chosen so that they only
    control
    rarely used configure options XXX.
    
    I agree, however, that this is wrong or at least non-standard and
    confusing.
    
    So if you would like to write a patch then I will be happy to
    include it.
    
    Thanks,
    Jürgen

On 12/13/21 6:49 AM, Marco Sirabella wrote:

Hello,

I’m taking another stab at packaging gnu-apl for my personal gentoo overlay, and I’m running into this funny build behaviour:

apl-1.8$ ./configure --without-erlang
...
checking if we want to build an erlang interface (implies libapl.so)... yes
...
apl-1.8$ make
...
Making all in erlang
make[2]: Entering directory '/tmp/tmp.jRec7xMUbt/apl-1.8/erlang'
erlc apl.erl
make[2]: erlc: No such file or directory

I can reproduce this with most of the optional feature flags, --without- doing the same as --with.

Digging into the code, it looks like AC_ARG_WITH’s action is action-if-present, whether --with or --without. You would have to do some checking with $withval to actually know what was passed.

Alternatively, you could just use $with_erlang / $without_erlang, but that is a more substantial change.

I’m willing to write up a patch, just want to gauge interest/how this all is expected to work.

AC_ARG_WITH

– Marco Sirabella