behnke> Richard Levitte - VMS Whacker wrote:
behnke> >
behnke> > behnke> Would it be possible to port autoconf/m4 to Perl?
behnke> >
behnke> > That should be possible. Personally, I like the idea enormously! At
[... yada, yada, yada ...]
behnke> I know this might sound like the ultimate MegaKludge, but
behnke> would it be possible to make perl execute the shell code.
*cough* Uhmmm, yeah, it's possible, with the `system' statement, but
pray tell me, what would we gain from that? Or were you thinking
about making a sh interpreter in perl? That's overdoing it...
behnke> The reason for having to do this is the fact that translating
behnke> all the M4 macros does not solve the problem.
Oh?
behnke> Everybody would need a correctly configured autoconf suite,
behnke> most of all the _user_
Incorrect. The *developers* (or at least one per project) would need
a correctly configured autoconf suite. The users only need to execute
./Configure. The idea you first mentioned, or at least that's how I
interpreted it, was to have ./Configure being written in perl instead
of sh. That would require the user to install perl, which is
available on virtually all available systems today, instead of running
sh, *which does not exist at all on some systems*.
For the makers/porters of autoconf itself, it would mean translating
all the sh code in acgeneral.m4 and acspecific.m4 (and whatever other
files are part of autoconf today) to perl once and for all, and then
continue that way.
behnke> because the configure script would be dependant on the target
behnke> OS.
Not terribly. It may be some paths, but that's relatively easily
solved.
behnke> Only under the assumption that the target machine has a sh(1),
I'm amazed you say that directly after being worried about
dependencies of the target OS... sh is basically Unix. Granted, bash
exists, and probably works correctly on Winblows. But then, you're
forgetting about a whole bunch of other OS:es, like VMS, MacOS, older
Winblows that people are apparently still dependant on, ...
behnke> ready made configure may be distributed and that is why
behnke> './configure && make && make install' works in the first place.
And if ./Configure was written in perl, it would require installing
perl first. That's not a difficult task... After that, it would work
exactly the same way.
This is getting a little side-tracket. Should we bring this to some
other forum, or continue privately?
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