On Mon, Jul 18, 2005 at 04:52:15PM -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> what confuses me is that i can do a native configure of curl *with*
> ssl, even though SSL is not installed under the default location
> /usr/local/ssl.
>
> according to the "configure" file, the option is
>
> --with-ssl=PATH
>
> where PATH is, by default, /usr/local/ssl. however, i can do a
> successful configure just by using "--with-ssl". but if ssl is not
> installed under /usr/local/ssl, how can this succeed?
>
> just for fun, i tried:
>
> $ .configure --with-ssl=/home
>
> which should certainly fail. it still worked. so what's up with this
> option? it doesn't seem to make any sense.

The whole truth is somewhat more complicated that "/usr/local/ssl is
the default" (for one thing, it's only the default if --with-ssl is
given). configure tries to be as smart as it can and goes to
great lengths to try to find a working OpenSSL installation for you,
including relying on pkgconfig. There are well over 300 lines of m4
code in configure.ac dedicated to handing SSL options, so a complete
description of what it does would take a similar-sized e-mail.
Read configure.ac for the whole story.

By the way, this kind of discussion is more appropriate for the curl-library
mailing list.

>>> Dan

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