[wplug] Compiler questions

[Duncan Hutty]

On Wed, 2005-02-02 at 12:08, Bill Moran wrote:
> 3) Aside from compiler optimizations, most software has a number of
>    compile-time options you can tweak (not all related to performance)
>    For example, I just recompiled Sylpheed with GnuPG support.
<snip>
> 5) Sometimes you can make software work by compiling from source and
>    telling it the non-standard locations of libraries that would
>    be otherwise unusable unless you upgraded a lot of other things
>    and went through a lot of headaches.

I did grep './configure -' < ~/.bash_history on some of the machines
that I have been logged into today. I stopped counting the number of
hits about half a dozen or so.

I think it would be safe to say that any time you type ./configure -,
the rest is something along the lines of -prefix=/my/preferred/location
--other-option-to-make-foo-work=1

Passing options to configure scripts is just not possible unless you're
using source. Clearly there has to be a balance. I don't need to
handcraft options to configure/compiler options to generate each binary
on my system, on the other hand the chances are that whenever I need to
do so, I *really* need to do so.


Duncan Hutty