Re: ./configure argument checking

On Fri, Oct 13, 2006 at 12:45:23PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> "Jim C. Nasby" <jim(at)nasby(dot)net> writes:
> > In the meantime, +1 to adding some whitespace around the warning... I'd
> > suggest two blank lines before and after.
>
> I don't really see that that would accomplish anything. The problem is
> exactly that configure emits many many lines of output which no one
> bothers to read --- it's been years since it even fit in my terminal
> window's scroll-back buffer :-( A couple blank lines in there won't do
> much except make the output even longer.

Well, if the warning was close enough to the end it would help. I
thought I'd just missed it, but I just tested again and couldn't find a
warning anywhere (I even grepped config.log). So I suspect that this
functionality is now borked.

> > ... personally I'd much rather have the default
> > be to error-out if it gets garbage arguments. If we provided a flag that
> > disabled that, all porters would have to do is to add that to the myriad
> > of flags they're already passing in.
>
> This is bending the upstream autoconf developers' idea of what to do
> well past the breaking point ;-). Still, if we think that bad configure
> arguments is a serious problem, maybe this is what we should do.
>
> The reason I like the "quiet mode" idea better is that "garbage
> argument" is not the only warning I fear people are missing. There's
> also the one about "you've got an obsolete Bison", which is either
> extremely important or utterly useless depending on whether there are
> up-to-date prebuilt .c files or not. That means we can *not* turn it
> into an error condition ... but because it is not close to either the
> beginning or the end of the configure run, it's virtually guaranteed
> that people won't notice it. If we fixed things so that the warnings
> were pretty nearly the only output, then they'd get noticed.

Hrm... I don't suppose there's a way to capture the critical warnings in
a temporary file and then cat that at the end? (I'm assuming that it'll
be nearly impossible to get a quite mode out of autoconf...)
--
Jim Nasby jim(at)nasby(dot)net
EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com 512.569.9461 (cell)