Re: [Nmh-workers] Autoconf changes & new feature

[Peter Maydell]

Earl Hood wrote:
>The more accurate statement is more likely the following: Requiring
>the pre-setting of envvars before building a package is something
>existing distro build systems are not tailored to support.

I don't think that's correct.

I know that Debian's package format supports this. I'm pretty
sure from 30 seconds googling that RPM packages support it too.
Gentoo's emerge files are just shell scripts so obviously you
can set envvars. Those three cover most Linux distributions.
It's also a pretty obvious feature to have. So unless somebody
has a specific example of a packaging format that would be
broken I think we can just dump this line of argument.

(I do think that we should care about not breaking back
compat for configure invocation, both for the benefit of
distros and for people who compile their own nmh, but Ken
has explained that in this case the old behaviour was broken
anyway so that's not a problem here.)

-- PMM