[MPlayer-dev-eng] [RFC] de-autoconf configure

[Rich Felker]

On Wed, May 10, 2006 at 11:37:40AM +0200, Diego Biurrun wrote:
> On Wed, May 10, 2006 at 11:29:51AM +0200, Ivo wrote:
> > On Tuesday 09 May 2006 09:43, Diego Biurrun wrote:
> > >
> > > people always think we have an autoconfigure script.  Who's to blame
> > > them, the output looks just too similar.  Since FFmpeg has never
> > > suffered from this problem I thought we might as well give in and fix
> > > what I would call a usability problem.  I made a preliminary patch.
> > >
> > > Comments?
> > 
> > Judging by the comments so far, I am one of the few that actually likes 
> > this. Maybe not exactly this specific patch, but I support the idea of 
> > having the output being clearly distinct from autoconf configures.
> 
> Judging from comments so far few people seem to have considered the
> arguments I brought forth, which indicates that I did not present them
> well enough.  I'll retry in another thread.
> 
> > Roberto made a joke about a skinnable configure script, but that's actually 
> > not a totally silly idea imho. I don't mean having configure skins 
> > installed in the system, that would be a joke, but configure could decide 
> > on how to display its output depending on the $TERM capabilities. For 
> > example, on a dumb terminal, it just outputs lines of text, some spaces, 
> > the result and a newline, but on a vt100 capable terminal, it could use 
> > colors, like green for success, red for failure, et cetera.
> 
> Not a bad idea at all ...
> 
> > The next step could be an (x)menuconfig like approach (linux kernel) ;-))
> 
> I propose an environment variable AUTOCONF_ME_HARDER to restore the old
> behavior ;-P

No, I propose making the configure script the minimal possible size
and simplicity to do what it needs to do. Anything else is
fundamentally the same idiocy of autoconf. If we want this stuff to be
reusable in other projects then size is critical since that's the
biggest flaw in autoconf. For a small project, the functional part of
the configure script should be under 20k. If it's another 10-15k for
whatever skin/eyecandy crap you want, that's 50-75% _useless_ overhead
and completely unacceptable. Of course knowing the type of people who
would write such crap it's probably more likely 100k. And let's not
even talk about the performance issues of coding such shit in portable
shell script!!

Please drop this stupid idea asap!

Rich