Bruno Haible <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > John Darrington wrote: >> ./configure could show a warning if gperf is not found or is too old. > > What do you gain by knowing this at configure time, rather than at "make" > time, a little later? To proceed with the build, you need to install gperf > anyway.
I admit there is no strong technical reason to do this, but I consider it good style. Configure can print a warning message that gperf may be needed if you are building from VC-sources, or if the user modify some files. Configure often check for dependencies, and prints warnings/errors about them, so people expect that to happen (and will look for such messages). In the 'make' phase, people don't expect build failures unless the configure phase somehow failed or warned about something. Alternatively, if the 'make' phase failed, some people will look at the Configure output to see if they can find odd warnings that may be related. For example, in GnuTLS, I recently received a patch that added a configure-time warning about missing non-required tools: AC_PATH_PROG([GAA], [gaa]) if test "x$GAA" = "x"; then AC_MSG_WARN([[*** *** GAA was not found. It is only needed if you wish to modify *** the source code or command-line description files. In this case, *** you may want to get it from http://gaa.sourceforge.net/ ***]]) fi Before it would just fail during 'make' if gaa was not available. /Simon
