Re: Autoconf options

Adam H. Pendleton wrote:

> Here is the list of options that I am going to support.  If anyone has
> comments, changes, etc.  please let me know, otherwise I will go ahead
> with these options:
>
> --with-wx=DIR  Specifies the root directory of the wxWindows
> installation (--prefix=DIR passed to configure when building
> wxWindows).  If this setting is *not* specified, then configure will
> search for wxWindows in /usr, /usr/local, and /usr/local/wx2.
>
> --with-pgsql=DIR  Same as above, except configure searches for pgsql
> in /usr, /usr/local, and /usr/local/pgsql
>
> --with-pgsql-include=DIR Explicitly specify the pgsql includes directory
>
> --enable-debug  Compiles a debug version of pgAdmin3.  This will
> override CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS and pass "-g -Wall -O0" to both of them,
> ensuring no optimization code is used.
>
> --enable-static  Compiles a static (as static as possible, that is)
> version of pgAdmin3.  This will pass a --static and --static-glibc
> option to the linker, to link against libc statically (this really
> won't do much, but it doesn't hurt).  This will also link against
> static version of pgsql and wxWindows.
>
>
> DEPRECATED:
>
> --enable-wx-gtk2 Compiles against the gtk2 version of wxWindows
>
> --enable-wx-unicode Compiles against the unicode version of wxWindows
>
> --enable-wx-release  Compiles against the release version of wxWindows
>
> --with-wx-config=FILE Explicitly specify which wx-config program to
> use, full path not necessary
>
>
> COMMENTS:
>
> Here are my comments about the above options.  I, personally, don't
> like the last four options, because they are only necessary when a
> user has more than one version of wxWindows on their box.  I am *not*
> going to include them unless I hear otherwise, and here's why.  If a
> user, or a developer, wants to compile against multiple version of
> wxWindows to test options, etc. (a perfectly reasonable situation),
> then they can compile and install wxWindows with different prefixes.
> So pass a different --prefix=DIR to the wxWindows configure, and then
> pass that directory to the pgAdmin3 configure with --with-wx=DIR, and
> pgAdmin3 will compile against that version.  Installing two different
> versions of wxWindows to the same prefix is probably bad news anyway
> (what if there are different versions of headers for Unicode?  The old
> versions would get overwritten).  I don't think it's necessary to
> support different versions in the same directory structure, and I see
> no need to do so.  Correct me if I am wrong, but otherwise the
> pgAdmin3 configure will automagically detect which version of
> wxWindows you have specified and link accordingly.

I totally agree.

> As for creating backwards-compatible versions of the autoconf scripts,
> Andreas is right.  There is no need to do this.   You do *not* need to
> run 'bootstrap' to create a snapshot, you only need to run
> 'configure'.  In truth, it's probably not necessary to even distribute
> bootstrap, configure.ac, Makefile.am, or acinclude.m4 in our
> snapshots.  The only reason for doing so is to help support platforms
> where the configure code fails (it happens, but not very often).
> Distributing those files would allow a user to re-generate configure
> if needed.  In most cases, it is not necessary.  So unless 'configure'
> doesn't run on Mandrake or SuSE or Debian or whatever, I feel no need
> to produce backwards-compatible scripts.   Obviously I bow to the core
> developers on this one, just let me know.

dito.

Regards,
Andreas