Re: --with and --enable to give paths

[Dustin J. Mitchell]

On Sun, Oct 4, 2009 at 12:50 PM, Reuben Thomas <address@hidden> wrote:
> The GNU coding standards actually say "Do not use a ‘--with’ option to
> specify the file name to use to find certain files. That is outside
> the scope of what ‘--with’ options are for. " which is not quite about
> paths, but I take the point.
>
> I've removed --with-lua-includes and --with-lua-libraries from
> ax_lua.m4 to comply. I suggest others do the same for their macros.
> (The idea is that you should set CPPFLAGS and LDFLAGS in the configure
> command-line instead.)

Using paths here is a *very* common practice, and your alternative is
not always appropriate -- the paths may be needed for a variety of
purposes, not just compiler compiler searches.  Worse, packages with
different executables linked in different ways may only want to use a
particular --with-$package for certain executables.  Using a global
CPPFLAGS or LDFLAGS does not allow this kind of flexibility.

I think that the coding standards should be changed, or at least ignored.

Dustin

-- 
Open Source Storage Engineer
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