[Xastir-dev] --with-bdb-include=/sw/include/db4

[Derrick J Brashear]

On Wed, 15 Dec 2004, Curt, WE7U wrote:

>> I'm with Derrick on this one.  Putting all sorts of system-specific
>> (and package-management system-specific) oddball probes into configure is not
>> "dangerous" but it is not quite what configure is meant to do.  If we start
>> (or even continue) down that path, configure will be an unmaintainable mess
>> in short order.  There are simply too many systems and package management
>> systems to make this a reasonable approach.
>>
>> Configure should not be expected to guess every non-standard location of
>> every possible package a developer makes the code depend on.  It should
>> provide the user with the means to specify where to find things that can't be
>> found with a simple set of probes.  For the most part we have that.  What
>> there should be is some system specific user notes in READMEs, telling new
>> users that if they're installing libraries from package-management system
>> Fooble, they will likely need additional configure options to locate their
>> installed libraries, and tell them what those options are.   Expecting
>> "./configure" with no arguments to work 100% for all optional features on
>> all systems is unrealistic, and puts the burden on the code maintainers to
>> keep track of all those systems' peculiarities.
>
> I think I'm getting confused as to whether we're talking about the
> possible Fink tweaks, or the Cygwin tweaks I just did to turn off
> optimization.

The fink tweaks (--with-bdb-fooble)

> All I'm after is:  More users able to configure/compile Xastir
> out-of-the-box on whatever system they're on.  If people must add
> configure flags in order to get things going, most of them won't get
> past that step and will go use something else.  Most users aren't
> that persistent.  They try once, perhaps twice, then give up.

fink isn't included out of the box on macos. neither is darwinports or 
(whatever the other one i forget now is)

if you figured out how to put fink on it, you can figure out how to run 
configure with a switch. but it still comes back to this, one of the fink 
users should contribute a fink port, and this whole issue should then go 
away.