Re: Echoing --prefix choice during configure

[Stepan Kasal]

Hello Brad,
  thank you for your concise description of the problem.

On Sun, Jan 01, 2006 at 07:29:22AM -0800, Brad Bell wrote:
>    configure: ******** Begin Checking Command Line arguments ***************
>    checking --prefix ... your choice can't be reported here (autoconf 
> limitation)
...
> In fact, I think that prefix (in the context of configure.ac)
> should be equal to this instead of NONE.

I agree.

> I do not like to use features that are not in the specifications because:
> 1) I do not expect such features to be portable to other systems.
> 2) I do not expect new versions of a program to meet such features.

Generally, you are true.  But this issue is clearly platform independent.
So 2) is the reason.

To fix this, a documented feature has to be added to Autoconf, and then
you can use it.  You might want to add compatibility code for earlier
versions.  (_Old_ versions won't change. ;-)

So we need a patch to set prefix to the default prefix instead of NONE.
And we need a patch to autoconf.texi to document it.

If you are able to contribute the patches, this might help...

In the meantime, I thich you are too strict:
>  ... your choice can't be reported here (autoconf limitation)

I think it would be better to print $prefix here; users might be able
to understand that NONE means that the prefix was not explicitly given.

Or you can do:

case $my_prefix in
NONE) my_prefix=$ac_default_prefix;;
*) my_prefix=$prefix;;
esac

This works now and there is a great chance that it will still work
when we get rid of prefix=NONE.

Sorry that I don't have a better news for you.

Have a nice day,
        Stepan Kasal