On Tue, Nov 02, 2004 at 09:22:36AM -0500, Andy Dougherty wrote: > On Mon, 1 Nov 2004, James deBoer wrote: > > > Some systems, notable Debian, ship perldoc and perl as seperate > > packages. The presence of Perl does not imply the presence of perldoc. > > > > This patch will test to see if perldoc actually works, aborting the > > configuration if it does not. > > I don't feel strongly about this, but I think aborting during > configuration is a bit extreme at present. If I don't have perldoc, the > 'make' process currently ends with a loud failure, but at least I can > still see if parrot Configures and builds at all, and I can still run > 'make test'. The only thing I can't do is install the documentation, > which really isn't relevant yet because the whole installation system > isn't really designed yet, and because there isn't really much to do (for > most of us) with an installed parrot anyway.
I don't like the build blowing up on me when there is no perldoc, and on some machines that I use I'm not in a position to change this. So I'd like a way of overriding Configure to skip building the documentation. I don't see overriding a bail out as incompatible with the sentiment that the default should be to bail out at Configure time if not found. I'd prefer it to bail out at Configure time than at make time, as it results in the problem being shown up far earlier. Unattended builds that fail at the end for detectable reasons annoy me. Particularly when something else time consuming was depending on them to pass, and so did not run. Nicholas Clark
