Avahi configure script is difficult for things like jhbuild to use

[james@…]

The Avahi configure script includes many checks for optional features, and bails out if the prerequisites for any of those optional features is missing.

It would be nice if after detecting that the prerequisites aren't available, avahi could disable the optional feature.

This makes it difficult to produce a single set of commands that will build avahi on a variety of platforms (as a buildscript like jhbuild would need to do), unless I explicitly disable all the optional features that may or may not be available on the target system.

[lennart]

Hmm, some people (notably package maintainers) detest such "automatic" configure scripts and are really thankful right now that Avahi doesn't do it that way.

I wonder how a good compromise could look like? Perhaps with configure options like "--enable-foo=auto" for the automatic behaviour?

[lathiat]

Or even some kind of global flag, e.g. --automatic-disable or something - which influences the behavior of all non-crucial dependencies?

[anonymous]

Being able to pass --enable-foo=auto to detect prerequisites for optional features would be fine. I understand the issues you are trying to address for package maintainers, so I'm not going to push for you to change the current defaults.