why runConfigure and not autoconf?

[David Starks-Browning <st...@ebi.ac.uk>]

Greetings,

(I quickly perused the mailing list archives for the past few months
and did not see this topic.  Apologies if it has already been
discussed or is otherwise taboo.)

I maintain software installations on four platforms at our site:
Linux, Solaris, Tru64 and IRIX.  There are separate shared
platform-independent (--prefix) and platform-dependent (--exec-prefix)
locations, provided to all machines by NFS.

Generally, we can build & install GNU autoconf-based packages on all
four platforms simultaneously, by building outside the source tree,
and setting CPPFLAGS and LDFLAGS before running configure.  My initial
impression is that this approach does not work for Xerces C++.

What is the motivation is behind src/runConfigure?  Can't the autoconf
tools be used to create Makefiles that will work without setting all
those environment variables?  I'm not an autoconf expert myself, but
I've built/installed a lot of packages, and few have required anything
like "runConfigure".

I appreciate that this is a work in progress by volunteers.  I'm not
complaining, honest!  I just wonder if there was a technical reason
for your current approach.

Thanks for your help, and for providing Xerces C++.

Kind regards,
David

 -------------------------------------------------------------------
  David Starks-Browning                  | starksb@ebi.ac.uk
  EMBL Outstation --                     |
  The European Bioinformatics Institute  |
  Wellcome Trust Genome Campus           | tel: +44 (1223) 494 616
  Hinxton, Cambridge, CB10 1SD, UK       | fax: +44 (1223) 494 468
 -------------------------------------------------------------------


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