From: Akim Demaille <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: 25 Apr 2000 18:05:03 +0200
The patch I submitted does what you don't it to do. This is because I
thought that never ever there would be a deep configuration using
--target, and with package that don't support it inside. I did so,
because it makes no sense to me.
But if it does make sense, if it does happen that people have a single
deep configuration tree and they do want to --target it even though it
makes no sense for some sub packages, then I'll
s/AC_MSG_ERROR/AC_MSG_WARNING/ my patch.
Still, for my own education, I would like to be taught why it would
make sense.
I might want to make a GNU distribution by simply putting all of the
GNU packages into the same tree. Then I can run a single configure
command and configure everything. In fact, that's exactly how the
Cygnus tree is organized.
If I then want to build that GNU distribution so that compilation
tools have a particular target, I need to use the --target option.
That option will be passed to all the subdirectories. They need to
accept it.
Rejecting --target because the configure script doesn't support it is
precisely equivalent to rejecting --enable-foo if the configure script
doesn't support it. It must not be done.
So I think the current behaviour is best.
If other people really dislike it, then an alternative would be to
define a new option which tells autoconf to silently accept unknown
options. This could then be passed down to the subdirectory configure
scripts. Of course, any such new option would have to be accepted
silently by old configure scripts as well.
Ian
