Re: [PATCH] Have configure complain about unknown options

On 5/4/06, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@svana.org> writes:
> > Currently, configure ignores unknown --enable/disable/with/without
> > options.
>
> The autoconf people consider that a feature, not a bug.  I'm
> disinclined to second-guess the designers of the tool, especially
> with a patch like this that mucks with the internals to the extent that
> it'll probably break in every future autoconf revision.
>
> Feel free to try to convince them to change it though ...

AFAIK that 'feature' is there to support configuring a 'tree'
of projects (like gcc), where subprojects have their own configure
scripts with different options.  That way you can give all options
to top-level configure script which passes them to other scripts and
each picks only whats needed.  In such setting all scripts need to
ignore unknown options.

As PostgreSQL tree is not set up that way, I think for clarity sake
it would be better to give explicit errors for unknown options.

--
marko