Modularization mailing list and initial strawman proposal

[Adam Jackson]

On Thursday 24 March 2005 19:01, Roland Mainz wrote:
> Kevin E Martin wrote:
> >
> > There are currently hundreds of options in the xc/config/cf/* files.
> > Some options will no longer be needed as they will be automatically
> > handled by the autotools.
>
> This is the part which I fear a lot: The autotools pick up dependices to
> things they find on the system regardless whether this is usefull or
> not. I have VERY bad experiences with this kind of autodetection and
> it's one of the things which forced people to have seperate, clean build
> machines just to make release builds of Mozilla/Firefox/etc. on some
> platforms (or use an chroot'ed environment (which was a pain in the past
> as some stuff as the license manager stuff in the Sun Workshop 5 days
> was very allergic against chroot'ed environments when you had a
> node-specific license)).

Technically this is a style issue.

My understanding of autoconf is that there's a difference between --with-foo 
and --enable-foo.  The --with form is used for features that have external 
dependencies, whereas --enable is for features that do not.  So for example, 
we would say --with-freetype but --enable-render.

The easy rule is --enable options default to on and --with options default to 
off.  This is too simplistic of course.  The reality is that we'll need to 
set sensible defaults and make sure that we don't add --enables that are 
really --withs.  But this is not different than under imake.

That other projects get it wrong doesn't mean we will too.

- ajax
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