Re: proposal - command-line option checking

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Wed, 13 Dec 2006, Steven G. Johnson wrote:

> Something that has been bothering me for a long time has been Autoconf's lack 
> of checking for command-line options.  That is, it doesn't give any error, or 
> even a warning, if the user accidentally types --with-foo or --enable-ffoo 
> instead of --enable-foo.  In my experience, this has caused numerous problems 
> because users think they've enabled things when they haven't.  (Heck, it's 
> burned me several times on my own programs!)
>
> Not only is it unfriendly, it's also unexpected: virtually every other Unix 
> command-line program complains if you pass it an unknown argument.

The reason why Autoconf behaves this way is that it is supposed to be 
possible to extract several different independently-maintained 
projects in a directory and drive them all via top configure script. 
The sub-projects might not use the same version of Autoconf and will 
surely accept different configuration options. A package maintainer 
may not know that his package is built subordinate to some other 
developer's package.

This approach was historically used for the GNU tool set.

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/