[Zlib-devel] [PATCH] configure: now accepting all gnu-style path options

[Enrico Weigelt]

* Volker Grabsch <vog at notjusthosting.com> schrieb:

> As the maintainer von Mingw-cross-env I can confirm this. We have
> the special "strangeness" of not only cross-compiling but also
> static linking.
> 
> Many packages need some tweaks, and Zlib is no exception to this.

Why does --static not work ?

> The packages which use Autoconf usually make the _least_ trouble.

Interesting. How do you handling crap like AC_TRY_RUN or AC_CHECK_FILE ?

> And trouble is usually the result of maintainers writing some short-
> sighted shell code directly into their configure.ac, instead of
> calling the appropriate macros.

True. 
But looking at the heavy (often badly-documented) syntactic and 
semantic changes between different autoconf release, I can really
understand why people prefer to write their own code.

Autoconf is far from being syntactically stable: a small typo can
result in unpredictable problems which might only pop up in certain
situations. And the superfat generated configure scripts are quite
undebuggable. That's due it's nature of being an m4-based language.

Actually, I don't see why a similar functionality couldn't be 
provided by a bunch of generic shell functions.

> However, among the hand-written configure/build scripts the one
> of Zlib is by far the best, smallest and fastest. Our latest trouble
> with Zlib was _not_ because of its ./configure script but because of
> its Makefile (which tried to install always the static _and_ shared
> lib, even if only one of them was built).

ACK. A minor issue which got easily cought by my automated build
machinery and is fixed in my branch.
 

cu
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