> > But presumably this isn't a one size fits all problem but depends on what
> > the user intends to do with Emacs. If configure just informs the user of
> > what functionality will be missing (rather than what libraries are
> > missing), *he* can decide, not us, if that is a problem or not.
>
> He still can decide, just pass the relevant --without-xxx to configure.
Yes but not without inconvenience. If he doesn't want images and hasn't got
the headers for gif, tiff or png then configure presumably aborts three
times until he finally uses:
configure --without-gif --without-tiff --without-png
and then he has to go through all of it again if later he wishes to configure
with different options, e.g., CFLAGS=-g .