proposal for common configuration elements for ITAPS services

[Jason Kraftcheck]

On 08/27/2010 07:51 AM, Vitus Leung wrote:
> Jason,
>
> I have a concern about the second difference from common systems in that
 > a single system for all libraries, ITAPS and non-ITAPS, might be
 > easier for the user.
>

I agree that this is a downside of this method.  However, there are 
several mitigating factors:

0) autoconf vars also appear in the help

1) autoconf vars are actually more commonly used than flags when 
specifying a single file or a path to an executable

2) While using --with-whatever=<somedir> has become a fairly common 
convention, it is not the documented use of the --with-* flags in the 
autoconf documentation.  The autoconf docs actually seem to push a 
solution where the user specifies LDFLAGS='-Lwhatever/lib ...' and 
CPPFLAGS='-Iwhatever/include ...'.  Probably because:

3) Using --with-whatever=<somedir> is somewhat broken.  It cannot 
accommodate things that were configured --includedir=... or --libdir=... 
to be something other than the default relative path from $prefix.

- jason