Subject: Re: [-SPAM-] [PATCH RFC v7 00/22] Modernize the build system

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 19 Nov 2024 08:39:12 +0900

Patrick Steinhardt <[email-masked]> writes:

> But for the second group I'm sceptical whether these really should be
> configurable by the developer. Why would you care whether you use
> `uintmax_t` provided by the system or by Git as a compat macro? I don't
> see a strong reason to let the developer override this in a build system
> that knows to auto-detect the availability of such features.
>
> Now as said, there may be cases where it indeed is useful, but in
> general I don't think it is.

I think we are on the same page, then.  When you said "detect", my
primarily thought was "uintmax_t and the presense of OpenSSL are
both auto-detectable, but the latter is a choice---forcing folks to
fight again to support the choice is unnice", while auto-detection
of the former in my mind was a given (perhaps think of "make +
autoconf" in an ideal world as a baseline for comparison).

There may be cases where it may be handy to pretend that types and
library functions your system offers do _not_ exist, for various
purposes like test-building or performance tuning, but these
purposes are of lessor importance than exclusion by policy, I would
say.