Question

There’s a flag for the make program that causes the compilation to go as far as possible to show as many errors as possible.

From make(1):

   -k, --keep-going
        Continue  as  much  as  possible after an error.  While the target
        that failed, and those that depend on it, cannot  be  remade,  the
        other dependencies of these targets can be processed all the same.

I was wondering if there’s anything one can do to get the same behavior from ./configure scripts.

I was trying to ./configure Pidgin to install it from source. But the configure script kept bugging me about dependencies that I don’t need, and my only solution to the interruptions was to give --disable flags to the configure script.

That’s why I would like to run through the configure script as far as possible so that it can notify me of all the dependencies at once. That way I can choose which I need to --disable and which I need to install, in one pass rather than having to run the configure script for each and every unmet dependency.

Is this possible?

Answer 1

autoconf doesn’t have a concept of dependencies, so the person building the autoconf input would have to do that for themselves and it would be highly painful. And the reason autoconf doesn’t try is that, while compilation dependencies in a Makefile are generally simple, figuring build dependencies can be complex — and even when they’re simple, it needs to be done in m4 so it’s going to be nightmarish. (m4 is easy for computers but hard for people.)