Re: requirement for newr packages

[Paul Eggert]

"robert hawkin" <address@hidden> writes:

> running the ./configure script does not seem to take into account
> whether a package can be compiled, simply the version of the package
> the author of the application is using. why cant it use 'locate'
> instead of pkg-config to find the headers, and 'grep' to verify that
> the function accepts the same number and type of parameters.

Sorry, but there seems to be a disconnect here.  One can program
a configure script to do whatever one wants, but the default behavior
isn't as you describe.

> i don't want to update
> all the packages on my machine every time I run configure.

You shouldn't have to.

> secondly, why does configure do the same tests every time? if the
> result returned by:
> what OS am I running
>  and
> has 'CC' -v changed
>
> should really remove the necessity to check everything every
> time. (checking length of command line arguments?!)

You can ask configure to cache its results.  This is documented in
the Autoconf manual.  The default is not to cache, since caching can
cause problems in some cases.

> thirdly, why perl?

Why not?  (If you don't like Perl you are free to rewrite that part of
Autoconf yourself.  :-)