On Wed, Jul 02, 2008 at 02:08:18AM +0200, Stefan Reinauer wrote:
but the fact is that the check is not precise enough.
It is very precise. It does not check for a compiler, because having a compiler installed for compiling is obvious. Having those additional packages installed is less obvious.
True, but because the compiler is so obvious it is easy to overlook.
At the very least the message is not clear enough. It claims to check for this package but in fact it isn't the only requirements, and when the check says that the package wasn't found, that can be incorrect. I don't think we should have error messages that can be false like that.
It is also a waste of time to do the check on every single make invocation.
I disagree with removing this. We started including it because we had so many people not reading the readme and complaining about failed compilation.
How do you feel about a configure script? Not autoconf but a simple sh script, much like xcompile, to check for compiler and library just once and then create the Makefile, possibly adding to LDFLAGS and CFLAGS from environment variables and/or --with-cflags --with-ldflags parameters in the process.
//Peter