in reply to daniel:// stenberg://

@lyda its practically an unwinnable war for non-trivial software :-( Each option always sounds reasonable in isolation when someone first proposes it. Even if you could retrospectively cull 20% of the build flags, the combinatorial expansion will still dwarf the number of scenarios it is practical to regularly test.

And yet this problem seems to mostly affect the C/C++ world. In other languages (perl,python, rust, go, etc) language specific build tools don't typically offer end users anywhere near the same level of fine granularity in build/deployment choices that people expect (demand) from C/C++ apps.

Has autoconf's design (inadvertently) pushed projects in an undesirable direction, and/or set unreasonable expectations for users in terms of granularity of build time choices ?

in reply to Daniel P. Berrangé 📷 🎨 🔭 📡

@berrange @lyda I don't think autoconf pushes for more options than anything else. It's just that these become build time options, not run-time as you would in many other places. Being able to switch off things at build time reduces attack surfaces that run-time checks cannot.
in reply to daniel:// stenberg://

An idea would be to randomly sample, say, 100 combinations out of that space using something like Vitter’s Method D [0], and test those.

I’ve been experimenting with this approach in my Clojure library [1].

[0]: ittc.ku.edu/~jsv/Papers/Vit87.…

[1]: github.com/nathell/cartestian