Re: 3.0.4 builds for solaris 2.7 and 2.8

[Alexandre Oliva <aoliva@redhat.com>]

On Feb 25, 2002, Peter Barada <pbarada@mail.wm.sps.mot.com> wrote:

> Have the top-level configuration script build a file that contains
> a list of the configuration option passed in, one per line, and the
> sub-packages configure script removes from the list those options that
> it understands.  At the end of all the sub-package configurations, if
> there is anything left in the list then its either unknown or mispelled.
> Of course the top-level configuration script would any that it
> undrestands.

There are options that apply to more than one sub-package, so this
won't work.  It could be made to work with some refinement, but still,
it would require every single sub-configure to be modified.

One could use the cache file to store pending options: initialized by
whoever creates the cache file, namely the top-level configure, and
such that each sub-package could take options it understood out of it,
but would still use the options it actually gets for the purpose of
telling which options are active.

At the end, the top-level configure looks at the cache file and checks
whether any option remained.  If so, it warns about it.

Yeah, that sounds pretty reasonable.  And it doesn't even require
changes in autoconf.  But it does require a configure script to know
whether it's the top-level one (easy to do, assuming we use
config.cache to tell), and it won't work if config.cache is /dev/null
or some other pre-exiting file.  Still, worth looking into.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva   Enjoy Guarana', see http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat GCC Developer                  aoliva@{cygnus.com, redhat.com}
CS PhD student at IC-Unicamp        oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist                Professional serial bug killer