Re: [PATCH] Display configuration details in --help

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz at gnu dot org>]

> Date: Thu, 21 Mar 2013 10:54:44 -0700
> From: Doug Evans <dje@google.com>
> Cc: gdb-patches <gdb-patches@sourceware.org>
> 
> I like the idea, but the implementation imposes a future
> maintenance burden.

Yes, I considered that as well.  But I succeeded in convincing myself
that the problem is not that significant, because:

  . configuration options change relatively rarely

  . it is not a catastrophe if a new option is added that is not
    reflected in this output for a while (options that are removed
    will cause compilation failures, so that's not a problem)

  . a slightly outdated output is much better than nothing at all

> Would it be sufficient to just store the original string somewhere and
> print that?

I thought about that, but the problem is that most options are not
explicitly mentioned on the configure command line, they are
auto-detected by the configury.  So if we want to automate this, we
will need some configure-time magic, like create a file with these
options.