Re: ./configure argument checking

"Jim C. Nasby" <jim(at)nasby(dot)net> writes:
> In the meantime, +1 to adding some whitespace around the warning... I'd
> suggest two blank lines before and after.

I don't really see that that would accomplish anything. The problem is
exactly that configure emits many many lines of output which no one
bothers to read --- it's been years since it even fit in my terminal
window's scroll-back buffer :-( A couple blank lines in there won't do
much except make the output even longer.

> ... personally I'd much rather have the default
> be to error-out if it gets garbage arguments. If we provided a flag that
> disabled that, all porters would have to do is to add that to the myriad
> of flags they're already passing in.

This is bending the upstream autoconf developers' idea of what to do
well past the breaking point ;-). Still, if we think that bad configure
arguments is a serious problem, maybe this is what we should do.

The reason I like the "quiet mode" idea better is that "garbage
argument" is not the only warning I fear people are missing. There's
also the one about "you've got an obsolete Bison", which is either
extremely important or utterly useless depending on whether there are
up-to-date prebuilt .c files or not. That means we can *not* turn it
into an error condition ... but because it is not close to either the
beginning or the end of the configure run, it's virtually guaranteed
that people won't notice it. If we fixed things so that the warnings
were pretty nearly the only output, then they'd get noticed.

regards, tom lane