Re: --with and --enable to give paths

[Reuben Thomas]

2009/10/4 Dustin J. Mitchell <address@hidden>:
> On Sun, Oct 4, 2009 at 12:50 PM, Reuben Thomas <address@hidden> wrote:
>> The GNU coding standards actually say "Do not use a ‘--with’ option to
>> specify the file name to use to find certain files. That is outside
>> the scope of what ‘--with’ options are for. " which is not quite about
>> paths, but I take the point.
>>
>> I've removed --with-lua-includes and --with-lua-libraries from
>> ax_lua.m4 to comply. I suggest others do the same for their macros.
>> (The idea is that you should set CPPFLAGS and LDFLAGS in the configure
>> command-line instead.)
>
> Using paths here is a *very* common practice, and your alternative is
> not always appropriate -- the paths may be needed for a variety of
> purposes, not just compiler compiler searches.  Worse, packages with
> different executables linked in different ways may only want to use a
> particular --with-$package for certain executables.  Using a global
> CPPFLAGS or LDFLAGS does not allow this kind of flexibility.

What's the difference between:

./configure --with-foo=PATH

and

./configure CPPFLAGS="-I PATH"

in this respect? They're both global settings for a particular build.

In any case, I was thinking specifically about libraries and headers;
I confess I haven't thought about other cases.

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