--disable-dependency-tracking

[Toby Peterson]

On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 02:16, Ryan Schmidt<ryandesign at macports.org> wrote:
> 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?

Pointless overengineering. It's simple enough to remove the flag if it
isn't supported.

> 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?

The primary consequence is that builds would be faster. :-)

- Toby