Re: [RFC] getting rid of the config.guess/sub problem when bootstrapping new ports/systems

[Eric Blake]

On 05/22/2013 10:22 AM, Mike Frysinger wrote:
>> I would MUCH rather see us honor a CONFIG_GUESS and CONFIG_SUB
>> environment variable, rather than baking in a PATH search.  This topic
>> has come up in the past, where I made the same request back then.
> 
> this might be sufficient for distro packagers (once they're "in the know" 
> that 
> they have to export these two), but that doesn't help people who download 
> arbitrary packages and run `./configure` themselves.
> 
> what if the autoconf macros grew a new option/macro so that in the very 
> uncommon case that someone has written their own, they could explicitly 
> declare so ?
>       AC_CANONICAL_CUSTOM
> 
> this would disable the custom search path and only respect the env vars

I still don't see why you are overengineering things.  Make the env-var
precious - then it will show up in ./configure --help output, and be
preserved so that ./config.status --config will show you what it was set
to at the time.  If the only way to get the override is via an env-var,
then there is no need for the complexity of either a baked-in path
search nor a means of letting SOME packages disable the complexity of a
baked-in path search.  If you can argue that SOME packages will want to
disable the complexity, then I can argue that we should make the default
of disabled complexity be everywhere.

-- 
Eric Blake   eblake redhat com    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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