On 19/09/2012 14:54, Mark Wright wrote:
David Matthews David.Matthews@prolingua.co.uk writes:
However this raises the question as to why you have included the "with-x" option at all. Unless you have strong reasons to include it I would recommend not building with this. I doubt that many users will actually want the X-Windows system and building with this option will introduce many unnecessary dependencies.
On Gentoo we allow the users to configure with USE flags which options are selected. The polyml ebuild always had the X USE flag to control the -with-x option.
Currently that means the X use flag is likely to be enabled on desktop machines, and disabled on server machines.
Since you advise against it I'm wondering about removing it or somehow disabling it.
I haven't used Gentoo so I don't know how the packaging works there. I guess I was assuming that you were building binary packages in a similar way to Debian/Ubuntu. If there is only a single Poly/ML package then it's not a good idea to make it dependent on all the X-windows and Motif libraries. I did read somewhere, though, that in Gentoo you build from source. If that is true then enabling the X-Windows system is fine on platforms that already have the X-Windows/Motif libraries and headers present. Perhaps I should get the "check" option for --with-x to work correctly so that it is possible to build in the X-Windows support if everything is present but silently fall back to building without X if something is missing. This is roughly the way GMP support is done.
I can help with the configure problem:
http://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-x86/dev-lang/polyml/file...
I wish I'd been aware of this earlier; I could have fixed the configure script before release.
Regards, David