At 11:33 PM 10/23/2001 -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> >> 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.
My impressions of autoconf are based on my first experience, which dates
back a number of years. (And the subsequent port of the thing to DCL for
VMS) The thing was full of special cases and odd workarounds to run on any
of a dozen different almost-but-not-quite-the-same implementations of the
shell. More recent looks just brought back really bad memories. :) It's
likely better now, as I don't think it could've gotten worse.
>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.
Configure still doesn't, which is part of the problem. Some systems
(notably VMS) have a home-grown configure checker which works out fine, but
others, like Windows, don't and have to count on static configs. (Last time
I looked there were several depending on your compiler, but that might've
changed)
I'd really like to reduce the amount of platform-specific stuff in the base
build/configure of perl 6. Having already done a configure-ish thing for
VMS, I think it won't be a huge problem, though rather tedious in spots.
Making the build system (past the initial bootstrap of microparrot) all
perl would make building modules on systems without a build system of their
own (like, say, the Mac, as I found trying to install Coy and
Quantum::Superposition on the 5.6.1 alpha the other night... :) and it'll
let us skip some of the more awkward bits of make.
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
[EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk
