Re: Five bugs (IBM-PC systems)

[Paul Eggert]

Pavel Jan Lastovicka <address@hidden> writes:

> Nobody can force people using a port of GNU make to use the Unix shell
> - they even need not have any...

Fine, but a port of GNU make to an environment should use a reasonable
shell for that environment.  If it doesn't, that's a problem with
make, not with autoconf.

> (Could you tell why this check for -g ?  For ordinary users
> it only slows down the build process and occupies
> considerably more disk space.)

Generally speaking, the less an installer knows, the more important
it is to have debug info in executables, since the installer is more
likely to get into trouble (and/or doesn't care one way or another).
This is longstanding Autoconf policy.

> But in general I dislike the idea that if one downloads a recent GNU package
> that he would have to get the latest available autoconf in order to generate
> a new configure script that wouldn't contain bugs from autoconf used
> when the software was packaged for distribution.

I don't see any better solution offhand.  If the package has a bug
like that, how would you fix it?