--disable-dependency-tracking

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Sep 2, 2009, at 03:39, Vincent Lefevre wrote:

> The GNU Coding Standards don't mention --disable-dependency-tracking
> because it is not an option universally recognized. In fact, this is
> a specific option defined by automake. Software not based on automake
> probably don't have such an option. The exit status of the command
>
>  grep -qe --disable-dependency-tracking configure
>
> should tell you whether the --disable-dependency-tracking is supported
> or not. Couldn't MacPorts use that (replacing "configure" by the real
> configure script name, if this can be changed) in order to decide
> whether this option should be used or not?

That sounds possible. I don't think MacPorts makes any other decisions  
based on the contents of the distfile... How do we feel about  
introducing such a change?


> BTW, using --disable-dependency-tracking always when supported
> (instead of just for universal builds) would make the build behavior
> more consistent and the build probably faster (since gcc won't take
> time for dependency tracking).

I don't know what dependency tracking does, but since the default is  
to enable it, I assume it's useful for something. Does anybody know  
what it's for or what consequences disabling it could have?