22 Jun 2009 randombit   » (Journeyer)

Isn't Autoconf Supposed To Be, Well, Automatic?

Wherein I complain about things that annoy me.

While attempting to build Carrier:

$ ./configure
[many tests run, taking several minutes]
GtkSpell development headers not found.
Use --disable-gtkspell if you do not need it.
$ ./configure --disable-gtkspell
[many tests run, taking several minutes]
GStreamer development headers not found.
Use --disable-gstreamer if you do not need GStreamer (sound) support.

And iterate that six times. Would it be so hard to just carry on and inform the user that some things won't be built because the headers were not found? Without an explicit --enable-blah request, these should not be hard errors (well, IMO).

Syndicated 2009-06-22 19:04:00 from Jack Lloyd

Latest blog entries     Older blog entries

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!