On Wed, 12 May 1999, Greg A. Woods wrote:

: > However, it's unwritten policy to patch the configure script if you need to
: > `if-bracket' something.  In other circumstances, we patch both configure.in
: > and configure (in that order), where the configure patch is the changed
: > portion of the regenerated script.  We SHOULD NOT add dependencies on
: > autoconf, as that adds even more hidden dependencies (...not everyone wants
: > perl just to build a couple small pkgs).
: 
: Say what?!?!?!?  First off plain old autoconf doesn't require perl -- it
: requires GNU M4

`Try again.'  The autoscan script is written in Perl, and as such, the
autoconf pkg depends on Perl.  (USE_PERL5)

: Secondly generating the "configure" patch and passing it around, instead
: of simply regenerating the entire script from a patched "configure.in",
: is just bad juju.

It's also a lot faster to build, and often (in the case of quick hacks)
would otherwise require major revision of the configure.in.

Regenerating configure, diffing it against the shipped configure, and
stripping out the changes that are only #line directives, provides a faster
build path for the pkg on systems that don't have all of {autoconf,gm4,perl}
installed.

: Thirdly I thought "we" had already agreed that patching configure.in and
: depending on autoconf was "The Right Way" to do things in pkgsrc.  There
: are already a number of packages that work this way, including the ones
: I've submitted patches for that include this change.

And I've reverted several of those.

: Finally the *right* way to fix this AC_CHECK_LIB() issue is to fix
: autoconf such that it can be told much more reliably what it should or
: should not do with "optional" requirements such as add-on libraries.

Tell the FSF people, not us.

-- 
-- Todd Vierling (Personal tv@pobox.com; Bus. todd_vierling@xn.xerox.com)