eliminating a cause of my recent rant and argument with Matt

[Dima Karpeyev]

--with-mpi=0 is a command, which is mandatory, and --with-sizeofint=8
seems to specify an optional parameter.
To me '--with' suggests something optional, so I'd vote for keeping
'--with' to indicate
optional parameters and replace it with '--use' (an imperative) when
specifying mandatory commands.

How's that sound?

Thanks.
Dmitry.

On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 3:14 PM, Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
>
>   I think a root of the miscommunication between Matt and I with regard to
> --with-mpi-shared is that --with is used for TWO different reasons
>
> 1) --with-mpi=0 --with-x=1 etc are used to indicate we want to turn off/on a
> package. In other words they are COMMANDS to BuildSystem
>
> 2) --with-mpi-shared=1, --with-sizeofint=8 tells BuildSystems FACTS that it
> would normally be figured out by BuildSystem. Usually they are provided on
> the command line because ./configure cannot run compiled programs (using
> --with-batch for example).
>
>   I suggest we can the syntax for 2) and consistently use --known-mpi-shared
> --known-sizeofint=8 etc everywhere in help and BuildSystem. It makes things
> much clearer and can prevent loads of confusion.
>
>   This is likely not compatible with how autoconf does things. Do they have
> a similar split and different names? Is there anything we can copy from
> their approach? Do we care?
>
>
>   What do others think?
>
>   Barry
>
>