On Fri, Aug 31, 2007 at 04:49:20PM +0100, Philip Hazel wrote:
> On Thu, 30 Aug 2007, Robert Roessler wrote:
>
> > Certainly, anything which made Mr Philip's life easier in terms of maintenance
> > and distribution would automatically have something in its favor,
>
> I obviously wasn't thinking straight when I allowed the #if HAVE_CONFIG_H
> thing, because now that I think about it, it is going to trip *me* up
> sometime in the future.
>
> The source of Exim (www.exim.org) imports a copy of the PCRE source
> files. This goes back to the early days, when PCRE was new and not
> likely to be found. One of these days it should be changed to use an
> installed version of the library, but that hasn't happened yet. I just
> copy in the lastest PCRE sources from time to time.
>
> I now realize that if I copy the latest (7.3) PCRE source files into
> the Exim source tree and try to compile, it won't work, because
> HAVE_CONFIG_H is not defined.
>
> I understand Daniel's point about people who want to configure using
> -Dwhatever instead of config.h, but perhaps the #ifdef is defaulted the
> wrong way round. It would be easier (and backwards compatible with
> earlier releases) if instead PCRE used #ifndef NO_CONFIG_H instead.
> After all, if somebody is using a slew of -Dwhatever, adding one more
> shouldn't make much difference.
>
> I am slightly tempted, therefore, to propose the following changes:
>
> (1) Change from HAVE_CONFIG_H to NO_CONFIG_H.
> (2) Change from <config.h> to "config.h".
> (3) Make sure it's all documented.
>
> However, I realize that HAVE_CONFIG_H is widely used in other software,
> so this is a cultural problem. Sigh. It seems to be part of the automake
> conventions, as it is apparently generated in the Makefile without being
> explicitly asked for. (It's in "configure", but not "configure.ac".)
I think this will confuse more people than it will help. Either way, you
are going to have someone unhappy with the decision.
Bob Rossi
