Hi David, * David Lee wrote on Thu, Mar 30, 2006 at 11:36:59AM CEST: > > For some of our options, when end-user feature "XYZ" is nice but is not > actually essential, we now have a local (developer) convention of: > --enable-XYZ={yes|no|try}
[ nice explanation of default and soft failure ] Generally, this is a very good idea IMVHO. In fact, we've been using a similar approach in some of our projects. ;-) (BTW, you can use `--enable-XYZ=@<:@yes|no|try@:>@', the alignment will look ok once Autoconf-2.60 is out and you use it.) > Might that model, that frame of mind, help in this "libtool" cases of > things like "AR", and the various not-necessarily-be-used compilers? Hmm. That would be something like: if the user explicitly sets AR but it does not work, configure should fail? This is really the rare situation: usually we search for the first `ar' we find in the $PATH, I have seen very few uses where AR was actually set manually. But yes, I assume that would be sensible to do, even if it doesn't help with the specific situation at hand. Please note that we actually have a TODO item to test whether $AR does the functionality of $RANLIB itself so that, as an optimization, $RANLIB may be skipped then (most of the time), or alternatively, whether $AR understands the `S' modifier so we don't build the symbol table more often than necessary. Those tests will be similarly runtime-expensive as testing whether $AR/$RANLIB work at all. Cheers, Ralf _______________________________________________ http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/libtool