Re: config.test fragments

mån 2006-04-24 klockan 22:52 +0200 skrev Guido Serassio:

> I think that the "config.test" magic should be true for all platform
> or for none: the "majority of users" is a too much indeterminate concept.

By majority I refer to the users who have the needed components in the
base system, not as third-party addon packages. I am entirely happy with
people wanting to build helpers dependent on third-party packages to
have to do a little more work to indicate they want these helpers build.

If this is not an acceptable goal for the automated selections of which
helpers to build then I propose we drop the config.test hack entirely,
and work on a more bullet prof approach.

My suggestion for an alternative is to provide a configure script in
each helper directory doing the needed probes, and if requirements is
not met the Makefile in that helper directory defaults to build and
install nothing. This would also remove some of the unneeded burden from
the top-level configure making it easier to maintain.

These configure scripts should take an --enable-basic-auth-helper-NCSA
(or --disable..) to indicate user preference about if this helper should
be built, overriding the decision made based on the probes. Most likely
there should be a --disable-basic-auth-helpers option as well to disable
building all helpers unless explicitly enabled.

In this design there is no special flags or tests in the main configure
script for telling which helpers to build. The magic is entirely
confined to each helper. And additionally configure flags for specifying
what to build behave more naturally.

Regards
Henrik