Re: gEDA-user: needing --disable-update-mime-database

[Dan McMahill <dan@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Peter TB Brett wrote:
> On Friday 16 May 2008 13:55, Dan McMahill wrote:
> 
>> Here is my fear with the autodetection.  Suppose you have the desktop
>> integration tools, but for whatever reason configure didn't find them.
>> Maybe you didn't have your path set right.  Or maybe someone is creating
>> a 3rd party package and forgot to list the integration stuff as a
>> dependency.  Now it configures and builds and installs with no warning
>> (unless you read through the very long build log) that it didn't find
>> something and hence won't run the database update.  Thats why I'd rather
>> have the user explicitly acknowledge that something wasn't found.  I
>> think this is probably a bigger deal with libraries where it is probably
>> more common for someone to have a library installed in a different spot
>> and need to give LDFLAGS= arguments.  This too is a case where I'd
>> rather see configure say "hey, I didn't find libfoo.  If this is ok,
>> build with --disable-libfoo but you will miss out on feature xyz"
>> instead of silently dropping feature xyz.
>>
> 
> I'm confused. Isn't this "fail and suggest extra configure flags" what the OP 
> was complaining about...?

It is, but I'm afraid the medicine is worse than the ailment in this 
case.  "Hey, why doesn't desktop integration work?  Everything 
configured and built ok?"   "oh, you needed to look somewhere around 
line 300 of your 2,000 line build log and see that there was a warning"

At a minimum, if autodetection/switching on/off of this feature were 
used I think there should be a prominent warning at the end of the 
configure stage that make it clear that you're about to miss out.

-Dan




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