On Thu, Oct 25, 2001 at 04:56:56PM -0400, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> 2) bite the bullet and eat the cost of running auto* with every "make"
>    until the package's author accepts the changes (they really are not
>    that expensive to run, especially not compared to the cost of
>    actually running the generated configure script!)

Ignoring the merits and demerits of your other arguments, I'll say
just one thing - a number of times I have cursed because I've tried
to make a package on a freshly-installed machine, and it needs to
use autoconf, or automake, and so it fetches, builds and installs
m4, gettext, and perl - not all of my machines are flyers, and this
usually means a couple of hours on my ss2s, to name just one slow
box. Also, it usually happens that my slower machines have smaller
disks. I really don't want perl on those slower boxes, as I don't
tend to use it that much. This is a polite way of saying I don't
want perl on any of my boxes, but I am forced to have it because
an author of a package won't accept some changes that he doesn't
like?

When this happens, I am not at all amused.

I don't know if I speak for anyone else here, but I could certainly
do without this extra baggage being installed.

Regards,
Alistair