[ On Saturday, January 24, 2004 at 07:56:30 (+0100), Martin Weber wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: Determining the "maximum length of command line argument"
>
> On Fri, Jan 23, 2004 at 09:49:05PM -0600, Ron Roskens wrote:
> > You can do this already. Set the value for the variable inside
> > ${LOCALBASE}/etc/config.site, and configure will automagically pick it up.
> > 
> > ie:
> >     roskens@hysteria$ cat /usr/pkg/etc/config.site
> >     lt_cv_sys_max_cmd_len=65536
> 
> Ah, didn't know that. But what I was referring to was to touch autotools to
> write their output into some file (well, probably this one as it's already
> taken care of already) automatically (sorted|uniq'd, whatever) so the usual
> user doesn't have to do this himself, doesn't run into the chance of writing
> nonsense there, and can rely on it getting updated accordingly if he updates.
> 
> To get the right value atm, you'd have to run configure somewhere and look
> at its results files to extract the right thing, that's unneeded 
> user-interaction and error-prone. If there was some package in the tree which
> just was there to run a configure stage with *every* function and *every*
> header, *every* binary being recorded that the base system possibly offers
> (that is, start from what NetBSD offers (stdlib.h inttypes.h errno.h etc. etc.)
> and have configure sort out things on non-NetBSD pkgsrc hosts). Run once,
> save time, ... -- automatically --, that's the point.

Yes, that's exactly right!

Once upon a time it would have been easy to simply hard-code the
config.site file with all the right values for NetBSD, and with just
enough shell code to do the right thing for 32-bit vs. 64-bit platforms.

The best approach now that pkgsrc is "portable" would indeed be for
someone to to write a pkgtools/autoconf-site package that all GNU
autoconf-using tools would require as a build-time dependent and which
would simply run all the "standard" autoconf-supplied tests once at its
own build-time and then write the results to ${PREFIX}/etc/config.site.

Somehow I seem to remember this very idea being discussed a great long
time ago, though perhaps I'm confusing it with a similar topic that's
been discussed on the autoconf list more than once....

-- 
						Greg A. Woods

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