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