On Tue, 13 Jan 2004, Bob Proulx wrote: > > > If the releases are all that similar, why not use: > > > > i686-GnuLinux-* > > > > as your test, and provide the "popular" distributions in the 3rd field? > > > > The "magic" command has a large database of selections on it; using this > > sort of mechanism should greatly ease the burder on the config.* > > maintainers. > > That sounds like the architecture and philosophy of imake.
Not exactly. The philosophy of imake is that the imake configuration is primarily vendor maintained. This is/was reasonable for X11 since most vendors were interested in supporting/offering X11. Autoconf does not benefit from that environment. Long ago I wrote a magazine article about Autoconf and feature-based testing (see "http://www.byte.com/art/9711/sec4/art2.htm";). At that time feature-based testing was relatively new and was being incorporated in open source packages. Based on the ease of installing most open source packages that provide a "configure" script, it seems that feature-based testing has proven to be a resounding success. Bob ====================================== Bob Friesenhahn [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen
