Re: [issue] ./configure --prefix=$prefix --infodir=$prefix/share/info broken

Ville Skyttä writes: You'll have to get Mike to discuss that. He insists that things be done as they are, but I've never personally had any reason to care one way or the other (no personal config problems, no need for the features he added, and I don't recall ever getting user questions either). [The package hierarchy configuration is a different matter, that has been controversial since the release of 21.4.0 IIRC.] The rationale is that "standard settings for standard variables" don't work. The GNU utilities in lib-src can't be compiled as C++, for example, and some commonly used options for C and C++ are not shared with the other. These --with-build-option flags are basically developer options, for people who want to build with C++ to get the benefits of better static type-checking and the like, or who want to turn optimization off in XEmacs but not in the utilities. These flags allow fairly flexible merging and sanity checking of configurations used by developers. If you're build a production XEmacs, I would assume that you use C, and the same build environment for both XEmacs and the lib-src utilities probably makes the best sense. AFAIK the default settings of the --with-build-option options are transparent to the usual environment variables. If that's not true it's a bug and should be fixed. Probably those options should just be documented as "for developers only; production builds should use the traditional environment variables". AFAIK that's lossage from the autoconf 2.13 -> autoconf 2.5x transition. The autoconf people decided that only built-in options can do without the --with (or --enable) prefix, but they also decided that FHS standard hierarchy would be enforced this way, and that they would change some of the traditional names. That turned out to be very unfriendly to non-Linux systems and users, who were supported by migrating the old familiar names that autoconf no longer supports to --with variants. Ie, if --statedir doesn't work, then --with-statedir will. Probably after several years of this policy by autoconf, everybody's more or less used to the new terminology and we could do without the bandaids, but anybody who submits a patch to rationalize the user- visible options is going to need to be around on c.e.x and xemacs-beta to hold hands of users whose build scripts fail when the options they use disappear or start doing something different. _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://calypso.tux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta