Re: [gentoo-dev] allowing configuration of builds?

[Pete Gavin <pete@gentoo.org>]

On Mon, Feb 05, 2001 at 02:42:08PM -0700, Pete Gavin wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I was thinking about a way we could allow configuration information to
> be passed to the ebuild scripts at build time. This information could be
> stored in the package database, so that doing "ebuild
> /var/db/pkg/{whatever}/{whatever}.ebuild remerge" would create the exact
> same package as before. We could make it so that if you do something
> like "ebuild {path-to-ebuild-file} query" it will tell you what
> configuration options are available, then you could set those options on
> the ebuild command line. That way, say, for example, there are packages
> that can use gnome, but don't require it, you could do
> 
> ebuild {ebuild-file} merge without-gnome
> 
> or some such to build it w/o gnome support. The ebuild file will check
> for these options and set the appropriate command line switches to
> configure. You could even cause these options to apply different
> patches. Has anyone else thought about this?
>

Oh, yeah, for example, right now we've got 3 different packages for
emacs; emacs-nogui, emacs-x11, & emacs-motif. With options like this, we
could make it into one package.

Pete