eliminating a cause of my recent rant and argument with Matt

[Richard Tran Mills]

I would like to second Dmitry's suggestion.  I guess this is not autoconf 
like, but I like the clear distinction that the imperative "use" makes.

--Richard

Dima Karpeyev wrote:
> --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
>>
>>


-- 
Richard Tran Mills, Ph.D.            |   E-mail: rmills at climate.ornl.gov
Computational Scientist              |   Phone:  (865) 241-3198
Computational Earth Sciences Group   |   Fax:    (865) 574-0405
Oak Ridge National Laboratory        |   http://climate.ornl.gov/~rmills