Re: silent installs

[Steffen Dettmer]

On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 3:26 PM, Ralf Corsepius <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 01/29/2010 02:05 PM, Steffen Dettmer wrote:
>> Could you please explain that?
>
> Example: Compling a package under linux
>
> configure --prefix=/usr ....
> ...
> gcc -DCONFDIR="/foo/bar" -DIRIX ...
>
> Using silent make rules you will not notice the bogus -DCONFDIR at
> compilation time. If you're providing package binaries your users will
> likely encounter run-time errors.

why is CONFDIR bogus? How should a user notice it? You mean a user
should know that this package isn't evaluating CONFDIR #define or a
spelling error or so? What runtime errors do you mean?
We use for instance -D_REENTRANT but why would anyone want to see it
when using "make -s"? There are hunderds of other defines that could
be wrong in sooo many files :-)

> Whether -DIRIX will cause problems would depend on a package's details.
> It's not unlikely compilation will succeed but use source-code which wasn't
> intended to be used under Linux.

Maybe the user wants to enable his "Internationalized Resource
Identifier eXtension"?

>> typing "make -s" is explicitly asking, isn't it?
>
> With gnu make, yes. But is it portable to other makes?

good question. I don't know. I pass -s only to GNU make (mostly
because I use only GNU make :-)).

Steffen