Show all missing dependencies when running configure

Question

I'm trying to compile a package in Cygwin. I run:

./configure

then after a minute or two, it says:

checking for working terminal libraries... Cannot find terminal libraries - configure failed

OK, read & install ncurses-dev, which takes a few minutes. If this is the only one, great! Otherwise, rinse and repeat... Many times, there are so many dependencies I would've considered not installing them in the first place if I knew...

Is there a way to tell configure to tell you all the missing dependencies? Not sure if it would make sense in all cases (such as chaining dependencies), but could be helpful either way.

Reading through:

./configure --help

doesn't seem to offer an applicable choice.

Or in other words, is there a way to tell it to run disregarding errors, just printing them and obviously not making an incorrect makefile at the end?

Answer 1

No, this is typically the domain of package manager. There's no option to ignore errors with configure scripts, since they usually have macros like AC_MSG_FAILURE and AC_MSG_ERROR which are expanded by autoconf to exit. You could look through the configure.ac or configure.in file to see what libraries / functions are being explicitly searched, but a lot of libraries that are considered 'core' in POSIX/BSD may not be so in a Cygwin environment.

FWIW, using the 'MacPorts' system for OS X, a dependency query for vim yields: ncurses, gettext, libiconv.