Autoconf options - Mailing list pgadmin-hackers

Here is the list of options that I am going to support.  If anyone has
comments, changes, etc.  please let me know, otherwise I will go ahead
with these options:

--with-wx=DIR  Specifies the root directory of the wxWindows
installation (--prefix=DIR passed to configure when building
wxWindows).  If this setting is *not* specified, then configure will
search for wxWindows in /usr, /usr/local, and /usr/local/wx2.

--with-pgsql=DIR  Same as above, except configure searches for pgsql in
/usr, /usr/local, and /usr/local/pgsql

--with-pgsql-include=DIR Explicitly specify the pgsql includes directory

--enable-debug  Compiles a debug version of pgAdmin3.  This will
override CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS and pass "-g -Wall -O0" to both of them,
ensuring no optimization code is used.

--enable-static  Compiles a static (as static as possible, that is)
version of pgAdmin3.  This will pass a --static and --static-glibc
option to the linker, to link against libc statically (this really won't
do much, but it doesn't hurt).  This will also link against static
version of pgsql and wxWindows.


DEPRECATED:

--enable-wx-gtk2 Compiles against the gtk2 version of wxWindows

--enable-wx-unicode Compiles against the unicode version of wxWindows

--enable-wx-release  Compiles against the release version of wxWindows

--with-wx-config=FILE Explicitly specify which wx-config program to use,
full path not necessary


COMMENTS:

Here are my comments about the above options.  I, personally, don't like
the last four options, because they are only necessary when a user has
more than one version of wxWindows on their box.  I am *not* going to
include them unless I hear otherwise, and here's why.  If a user, or a
developer, wants to compile against multiple version of wxWindows to
test options, etc. (a perfectly reasonable situation), then they can
compile and install wxWindows with different prefixes.  So pass a
different --prefix=DIR to the wxWindows configure, and then pass that
directory to the pgAdmin3 configure with --with-wx=DIR, and pgAdmin3
will compile against that version.  Installing two different versions of
wxWindows to the same prefix is probably bad news anyway (what if there
are different versions of headers for Unicode?  The old versions would
get overwritten).  I don't think it's necessary to support different
versions in the same directory structure, and I see no need to do so.
Correct me if I am wrong, but otherwise the pgAdmin3 configure will
automagically detect which version of wxWindows you have specified and
link accordingly.

As for creating backwards-compatible versions of the autoconf scripts,
Andreas is right.  There is no need to do this.   You do *not* need to
run 'bootstrap' to create a snapshot, you only need to run 'configure'.
In truth, it's probably not necessary to even distribute bootstrap,
configure.ac, Makefile.am, or acinclude.m4 in our snapshots.  The only
reason for doing so is to help support platforms where the configure
code fails (it happens, but not very often).  Distributing those files
would allow a user to re-generate configure if needed.  In most cases,
it is not necessary.  So unless 'configure' doesn't run on Mandrake or
SuSE or Debian or whatever, I feel no need to produce
backwards-compatible scripts.   Obviously I bow to the core developers
on this one, just let me know.

ahp