Tom Lord wrote: > > * Maintaining the build tools (autoconf etc) is currently too hard. > > The maintainers have to struggle to write portable shell code;.... > > Those constraints really matter to a small number of packages (the > "bootstrap packages") but could be reasonably relaxed for other > packages.
I'm not alone? > Let's then formally identify a _subset_ of the bootstrap packages, > which are those GNU tools that other (non-bootstrap) GNU packages are > allowed to depend on for the build process. For example, GNU Make > would probably be in this subset, as would a GNU shell. Call this set > the "build environment packages". To this should be added a "backfill" library. Programmers will know that ``#include <backfill.h>'' will ensure that all the standard POSIX-isms will be defined and ``-lbackfill'' will ensure that much of the commonly omitted functions will be added as well. Get rid of all that configury testing cruft. It'll just "be there".
