configure.ac -- checking for fink

[David Fang]

> We expect fink itself to provide proper CFLAGS and LDFLAGS.  This is
> for people building by hand on a Mac which has fink installed, and
> Pidgin dependencies provided by fink.
>
>> I understand the motivation for the shortcut check.
>> But I also wanted to point out that people who happen to use fink (in /sw)
>> and say, macports, might be surprised at to find building against /sw even
>> after options for other paths have been specified.
>
> This is a valid point; however, that particular check was added to
> stem the flow of users asking why Pidgin wouldn't build on their OSX
> box, even though they had installed the proper dependencies in fink.
> People who don't fall under this category can hopefully figure things
> out.

... which makes me wonder if the macports folks have noticed this in their 
validation, since there are parties that use both package managers. The 
fink maintainers probably noticed because they constantly build 
non-default variants (cvs branches and what not) of parallel fink-trees 
for testing [/sw1 /sw2 /sw3 ...].  If you insist on keeping it, maybe you 
could provide a means of disabling that hard-coded check: 
--disable-fink-check? Or generalize it to an AC_DEFUN macro where the 
automatic prefix to build against can be passed.  [--build-prefix=/sw 
(default: none)], synonymous with CPPFLAGS=/LDFLAGS=. I still recommend 
removing the snippet, but will accept whatever you decide; it's not a 
major issue -- there are bigger fish to fry.  :)
Thanks for your attention.

David Fang
Computer Systems Laboratory
Electrical & Computer Engineering
Cornell University
http://www.csl.cornell.edu/~fang/
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