Re: Have configure complain about unknown options

On Tue, May 09, 2006 at 02:00:34PM +0200, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> Am Dienstag, 9. Mai 2006 10:55 schrieb Martijn van Oosterhout:
> > Can you explain why? Unknown options don't do anything, so having users
> > remove them seems like a good move.
>
> Build system frameworks assume that they can pass any option and that unknown
> options will be ignored.  This grew out of the old Cygnus GNU megatree but as
> you saw it is also used by package building frameworks like CDBS.  In fact,
> if we one day separate the PLs into separate source tarballs, I'd like to set
> up a similar megatree system so building everything becomes easier.
>
> I don't object to having a strict mode or printing warnings or printing a
> summary at the end, but we are not in a position to redefine build system
> practice.

Then it seems like the best way to go would be to provide
--disable-strict-mode. I dislike the idea of printing a summary, because
it's easy to miss problems there, and it's also very counter-intuitive.
Until now I'd always assumed that configure would always complain about
invalid arguments because I've seen it happen before; I didn't think
you'd actually have to write code to make it do that (talk about a
brain-dead tool...)

In any case, I think the real use case here is catching errors from
general users who are installing from source, which disqualifies
--enable-strict as well as setting a shell alias.

Hopefully no one finds any need to use --disable-strict and it can just
be dropped down the road...
--
Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant      jnasby@pervasive.com
Pervasive Software      http://pervasive.com    work: 512-231-6117
vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf       cell: 512-569-9461