on Sun Nov 02 2008, Vladimir Prus <vladimir-AT-codesourcery.com> wrote:
Yeah. For a surprisingly large number of *nix users, if the process doesn't look like ./configure && make && make install, they will get upset.
I am not so sure
This is not just a theory; we have empirical evidence.
-- it is my feeling that any process that, in default case, does not requires to manually specify anything, but just run 1, or 2, or 3 commands, will be fine with most folks.
That's the reason the configure script was created. Only a small subset of those users may try to set CXXFLAGS et. al, and even a smaller subset needs to do cross-compilation, so I believe we're making more people happy than angry. I would be very, very cautious about removing the configure script.
In any case, we can retain the configure script, but make it wrapper over the above scheme, and also change the makefile to be exactly this:
all: bjam install: bjam install
That's fine with me. -- Dave Abrahams BoostPro Computing http://www.boostpro.com