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

[John Bowler]

From: Enrico Weigelt
>In the past 10 years, autoconf-based packages have been the vast majority
>of troublemakers for me.

Ok, so when you cross compile libpng (which provides both a configure script
and per-plaform Makefiles) do you use the autoconf generated configure
script?  If so, why; and, for that matter, if not, why not - what's the
problem with the thing you don't use?

>To be fair: in recent years, it's possible to create cleanly
crosscompile'able packages
>if you dare not to use ill macros like AC_TRY_RUN, AC_CHECK_FILE, etc and
do imports
>exclusively via pkg-config.

How does *not* using autoconf help in this case?  I don't understand what
someone who writes a configure.ac that uses AC_TRY_RUN does in a
non-autoconf build; when I've seen this the real problem has been that the
package author assumed that a build-system compiled program could reveal
run-time facts about the target system.  I've never seen this problem
introduced by using autoconf.

Indeed, I'd go much further.  AC_TRY_RUN is detectable, whereas build time
use of the compiler to determine target system characteristics outside
autoconf makes it very difficult to work out whether the technique is valid
in a cross-compiled environment.

John Bowler <jbowler at acm.org>