Re: FYI: optional features and AC_ARG_WITH

[Stepan Kasal]

Hello Alexandre,

On Tue, Apr 19, 2005 at 10:31:22AM +0200, Alexandre Duret-Lutz wrote:
> I suggest avoiding {...,...} and using two help lines.  That
> looks cleaner to me, and it helps tools that parse ./configure's
> --help output (Zsh's completion comes to mind).

OK, that would look like this:

AC_ARG_WITH(readline,
  [AS_HELP_STRING(--with-readline,
    [force building with readline])
AS_HELP_STRING(--without-readline,
    [force building without readline])],
  [],
  with_readline=check)

I also considered this variant, but the problem is that the second
occurence of AS_HELP_STRING cannot be indented, so the result looks
slightly confusing.  And, of course, there is one more line in the
evergrowing ./configure --help.

Yet another idea: what about something like this:

AC_ARG_WITH(readline, [  --with-readline
AS_HELP_STRING(--without-readline,
    [force whether support for fancy command line editing is used])],
  [],
  with_readline=check)

or

AC_ARG_WITH(readline,
  [m4_n([  --with-readline])AS_HELP_STRING(
    --without-readline,
    [force whether support for fancy command line editing is used])],
  [],
  with_readline=check)

But I'm not happy with either variant.

After all, it might be best to use "(default=check)" and add:

@c FIXME: The default should be in brackets; fix this as soon
@c as AS_HELP_STRING is fixed to handle quadrigraphs.

or even to fix the quadrigraph handling...

Have a nice day,
        Stepan