On Tue, Mar 16, 2004 at 07:47:25PM -0500, Dan Sugalski wrote: : Second, we're running over the same problems in system configuration : that perl (and python, and ruby, for that matter) have already run : across. Moreover, we're making the same decisions, only... : differently. This is silly both because we're re-inventing the wheel : and we're making the wheel with metric nuts instead of english. : : We could go dig through perl's configure every time we add a new : environment probe, but that'll get really old really quick. Instead, : what I'd like is for someone (Oh, Brent... :) to go through perl's : configure and dig out the tests in it, as well as the defaults that : it has and just get all the config variables in once and for all. : While some of what's in there we don't have to deal with (joys of C89 : as a minimum requirement) there's a lot of hard-won platform : knowledge in there and ignoring it's foolish.
Er, yes, but...you might actually do better by looking at all the metaconfig units that go into generating Configure. Then you'd at least know what all the dependencies are. Oh, and metaconfig will gladly do the work of weeding out the tests you're not interested in. Not using metaconfig (or something like it) would be the biggest mistake. It's actually next to impossible to maintain something like a Configure script directly. Larry
