Re: gEDA-user: Meaning of --with-x and --without-gui for pcb

[der Mouse <mouse@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>> If anything, I'd suggest that the presence of this flag represents a
>> minor, cosmetic bug which one could file against the GNU autotools.

> That may not be minor ..  Autoconf is loaded with irrelevant checks.
> If one of them fails, and prevents it from building, when nothing is
> really wrong, that is a major bug.

Autoconf-generated configure scripts are horrible, horrible beasts.
They are security disasters waiting to happen (they are almost perfect
trojaning targets - mind-numbing to vet manually, very hard to sandbox,
far harder than programs to vet mechanically, and, worst of all, they
are training people to blindly run them).  And, when they get something
wrong, they are hell to fix.

At work I recently had occasion to try to set up amanda 2.6.1 on NetBSD
4.0.1.  amanda needed glib, which in turn needed pkg-config.  Each of
these three uses an autoconf-generated configure script.

pkg-config's configure script produced a syntax error complaint from
sh.  glib's configure script broke because it tested statfs(), found
that we had such a routine somewhere it could link to, and jumped to
the (incorrect) conclusion that we had the full API.  (statfs() is
present for ABI compatability; the API is not present.)  Then, based on
that, it tried to figure out how many arguments it takes, which failed
because the API isn't there, and fell over hard.  Then, amanda's
configure script broke trying to figure out GNU tar and smbclient,
apparently because of shell quoting bugs in the script.  (I ran into
plenty of other problems too, but they aren't relevant to configure
scripts.)

That's three for three where I had to edit the configure script to make
it even run to completion, never mind actually getting things right.

No, when I run into something that uses configure scripts, I almost
always throw it into /dev/null and look for alternatives.  (Amanda I
was being paid to struggle with, and even then I insisted on pushing
the decision to ignore the security nightmare upstairs from me.  If it
had been for my own machines, fugeddaboutit.)

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