Re: RFE: configure -> dependency list on exit.

[Paul Eggert]

Hugh Sasse Staff Elec Eng <address@hidden> writes:

> As to my providing patches for this: well, if I was familiar with
> the internals, then it would be practical for me to do that.

Perhaps you could find someone who is willing to implement the
proposal?  I'm afraid I lack the time.  And it seems that there are
many issues involved.

Part of the problem here is that your proposal is almost diametrically
opposed to how Autoconf currently behaves.  Currently, Autoconf
doesn't care about names of packages: all it cares about is which
features are available, and which aren't, regardless of which package
supplies the features.

As I understand it, you are proposing that Autoconf generate a
component that can be used as part of a packaging strategy that is
based on package names and versions.  From Autoconf's point of view,
this is a simplistic approach that is relatively hard to maintain --
lots of stuff will have to be done by hand that Autoconf currently
does automatically.  (E.g., which versions of GNU/Linux support
clock_gettime with CLOCK_MONOTONIC?  Surely you don't want to maintain
that sort of information by hand.  So will you have a database that
stores this stuff automatically?  How will it be maintained, exactly?
That sort of thing.)

I'm not saying your idea lacks merit: there are real problems in this
area that it would be nice to address.  However, I suspect you'll
discover, when you try to implement the idea for Autoconf, that
there's a reasonably large amount of thinking that needs to be done
before the proposal would be practical.  For example, you may discover
that you need to model features, rather than merely modeling packages
and version numbers.  This will require some real design work, which
will require a significant amount of time.

(Perhaps I'm being overly pessimistic.  But in that case you can prove
me wrong by supplying a working implementation with some examples of
how it's used.  That would be ideal.  :-)