Re: configure -C by default?

[Brian Gough]

At Sun, 6 Feb 2011 23:11:43 +0100,
Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> Back then, the consensus was to not make it the default because that was
> deemed too dangerous for users.  Various reports are cited, and also the
> problem is mentioned that such kinds of failures tend to be quiet very
> often and are hard to debug.

The reports are convincing for me that it would be bad to revive the
old behaviour.

Most of the GNU maintainers at FOSDEM didn't know about the -C option
though.  Maybe it would help to publicise "-C" in the output so people
are more aware of it. e.g. 

    $ ./configure
     configure: not caching test results (use -C to enable)
     checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c
     ...

The message could be suppressed if config.status does not exist, so
it's only shown if someone is configuring more than once.

-- 
Brian Gough