Comment 7 for bug 1037311

Personally, I think checking it only at runtime is a poor user experience. (But I think the general opinion disagrees with me.)

 It's surprising for a user to compile dolfin from source, get a success message, and then try to use it only to find that you still need to install more stuff. From a user's perspective, build dependencies and runtime dependencies are just dependencies. It doesn't particularly matter for the user experience how that dependency is used, it only matters that the user needs to install it before they can actually get on with whatever they really want to do. I had thought that I had done all the boring installation work, and then I found out that I actually hadn't.

It might be useful to have a warning at configure time that not all runtime dependencies are met (but still go ahead and build)?