Subject: Re: [htdig3-dev] auto config from Apache httpd.conf
From: Tom Metro (tmetro@vl.com)
Date: Fri Dec 03 1999 - 15:24:19 PST
Geoff Hutchison <ghutchis@wso.williams.edu> writes:
> >Ideally, one would like to see configure ask for the path to an
> >Apache config file and it would extract information like this.
>
> While I use and like Apache a great deal, I'm not sure this is a
> great idea. If you do it for Apache then people start asking why you
> don't do it for Netscape, Roxen, IIS, etc.
I would expect this to follow the same rules as the rest of the
project: what gets contributed gets included. If Apache is the most
common server encountered, it will likely be the first contributed and
supported.
> Plus, many people use binary pacakges, which will likely use these
> defalts anyway.
If I remember correctly, Ht://Dig's configure doesn't actually ask the
user any questions - it just runs through its automated tests, and the
stuff extracted from an httpd.conf isn't really needed at build time,
so maybe what's needed is a post-build config tool.
Personally, I tend to favor installation systems where you fill in a
few well documented blanks in a text file, and then kick off the
process. Systems that are too automated at discovering information can
be a pain to deal with when something breaks in the auto discovery
process.
Similarly, systems that depend on command line options to set the
install directory and similar properties are less convenient as that
information doesn't get saved anywhere for future builds. If it's
tucked into a setup file, the user can unbundle a new version of the
product, copy over the setup file, and run configure, make, etc.
The CONFIG file in Ht://Dig comes close to this, but it's used to save
the output of configure, rather than to setup defaults going into
configure. For the most part, this shouldn't make a difference, but if
a new version of Ht://Dig has configure output new variables, using an
old version of CONFIG will clobber them.
I'm sure this can be accomplished with GNU configure, but I'm not
familiar enough with it to know how.
-Tom
-- Tom Metro Venture Logic tmetro@vl.com Newton, MA, USA------------------------------------ To unsubscribe from the htdig3-dev mailing list, send a message to htdig3-dev-unsubscribe@htdig.org You will receive a message to confirm this.
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