Re: Is this a bug in autoconf? (patch included)

[Tom Tromey]

Akim> But if it does make sense, if it does happen that people have a
Akim> single deep configuration tree and they do want to --target it
Akim> even though it makes no sense for some sub packages, then I'll
Akim> s/AC_MSG_ERROR/AC_MSG_WARNING/ my patch.

Akim> Still, for my own education, I would like to be taught why it
Akim> would make sense.

Locally we put everything into a single tree, which you can configure
with one command.  This is really handy if we want to, say, ship a
version of "make" to our customer.  It means less work in release
engineering.

However, "make" doesn't use --target.  Still, it gets passed in by the
top-level configure.

You could argue that the top-level configure should just know which
subdirs use --target and which do not.  However, I consider that to be
a bad idea.  It violates modularity and is harder to maintain.

I think it shouldn't even be a warning.  I think configure should
accept --target silently just as it does not.

Tom