bugGNU roff - Bugs: bug #50928, configure should fail if...

 
 

bug #50928: configure should fail if "--with-x" given but can't be honored

Submitter:  G. Branden Robinson <gbranden>
Submitted:  Wed 03 May 2017 01:36:19 PM UTC
   
 
Category:  General Severity:  2 - Minor
Item Group:  Build/Installation Status:  Invalid
Privacy:  Public Assigned to:  bgarrigues
Open/Closed:  Closed Planned Release:  None
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Fri 12 May 2017 10:50:52 PM UTC, comment #2: 

Please close this bug report as invalid.

The GNU Coding Standards say in Section 7.1 "How Configuration Should Work":

https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Configuration.html

All configure scripts should accept all of the “detail” options and the variable settings, whether or not they make any difference to the particular package at hand. In particular, they should accept any option that starts with ‘--with-’ or ‘--enable-’. This is so users will be able to configure an entire GNU source tree at once with a single set of options.

End of citation.

That means Bertrand's difficulties when trying to change the behaviour are not a limitation of autoconf(1), but changing that behaviour is intentionally unsupported.

I believe a core GNU project might not want to gratuitiously diverge from the GNU Coding Standards in a question of interoperability of this kind.  Besides, this convention is also used elsewhere.  For example, the OpenBSD ports tree assumes that --with-... arguments can be given to GNU configure scripts and will simply be ignored if unsupported by the particu[ar program in question.

So changing this established behaviour might easily cause porting headaches even on non-GNU systems.

Ingo Schwarze <schwarze>
Group Member
Mon 08 May 2017 04:31:33 PM UTC, comment #1: 

By default groff will look for X and behave accordingly (disable the build of some programs) if not found (groff_no_x set in m4/groff.m4).  What you would like is make configure fail if --with-x is passed.  The problem is that this option is bring with autoconf's built in macro AC_PATH_XTRA, and I haven't found a mean to check whether the user passed this option or not.

Bertrand Garrigues <bgarrigues>
Group administrator
Wed 03 May 2017 01:36:19 PM UTC, original submission:  

If I ask the configure script for something and it cannot honor my request, it should not exit as if everything is okay, like a configure where X support wasn't requested.

$ ./configure --prefix=$HOME --program-prefix=local- --with-x
checking for gcc... gcc
checking whether the C compiler works... yes
checking for C compiler default output file name... a.out
[...]
checking for IceConnectionNumber in -lICE... yes
checking for Xaw library and header files... no
checking for Xmu library and header files... no
configure: gxditview and xtotroff won't be built
[...]
config.status: executing depfiles commands

GNU Troff version 1.22.3
----------------------------------------------------------------------
 Prefix            : /home/branden
 Compiler          : gcc -g -O2
 X11 support       : no
 Doc build         : yes
----------------------------------------------------------------------
$ echo $?
0

G. Branden Robinson <gbranden>
Group administrator

 

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    Follow 7 latest changes.

    Date Changed by Updated Field Previous Value => Replaced by
    2022-01-22 gbranden CategoryNone General
        Item GroupNone Build/Installation
    2017-05-13 bgarrigues StatusNone Invalid
        Open/ClosedOpen Closed
        Planned Release1.22.4 None
    2017-05-08 bgarrigues Assigned toNone bgarrigues
        Planned ReleaseNone 1.22.4

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