Robert Spier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Tue, 2001-10-23 at 20:52, Russ Allbery wrote: >> Dan Sugalski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>>> Once we build miniparrot, then *everything* can be done in >>> perl. Having hacked auto* stuff, I think that'd be a good >>> thing. (autoconf and friends are unmitigated evil hacks--people just >>> don't realize how nasty they are because they never need to look >>> inside) >> I've looked inside a lot, and I definitely do not agree. But maybe you've >> not seen autoconf 2.50 and later? > Russ- Could you expand on this? 2.50 seems to be at least 80% the same > as the previous versions, with very similar m4 syntax, some new macros > added, some old macros removed, some old bugs fixed, some new bugs > added. I'm not sure what there is to expand on. I've looked at 2.50, and it definitely doesn't look like an unmitigated evil hack to me. It looks like a collection of tests for various standard things that packages need to know to compile, put together about as well as I can imagine doing that for the huge variety of tests one has to deal with. I haven't worked with metaconfig instead, but I have to say that I find it way easier to deal with autoconf than to deal with metaconfig. (I know this is heresy in the Perl community. *grin*) I've maintained the autoconf configuration for a reasonably large package (INN), but not one that requires portability to Windows -- at the same time, last time I checked, Configure doesn't really deal with portability to non-Unix systems either, being a shell script itself. Perl seemed to just bypass it in favor of pre-generated results. But I could be behind on the state of the art. The shell script it generates is butt-ugly, but that's the price of insane portability. I'm not as fond of automake or libtool, but libtool at least lives up to what it says it does, and takes care of a bunch of portability issues that are rather obscure and difficult to deal with. -- Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
