On Tue, 15 Oct 2002 05:38:49 +1000 Dean Povey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >How could you distribute a binary to run on all the different kinds of > >systems? I use Cygwin and MinGW. Am I going to be excluded from Open > >Source packages because the package maintainer decided not to provide > >such a binary? I don't follow the logic here. Are you saying that the > >package maintainer will compile a binary "./configure" using h[er|is] > >"build tools"? Or are you saying each end user will first unroll the > >tarball and then build a binary "./configure" (the latter being the > >only way that seems to make sense). Then you still have the problem of > >the C library. I assume if the latter, that there will be a canonical > >download location (+ mirrors) for precompiled libraries (on my > >platform(s), that means Windoze DLLs)? > > The easiest way would be for ./configure to find the C compiler and > build a simple utility binary from source, then use that for the rest of > the configuration. > I was thinking something like that, but to avoid a catch22, it would require the platform have a previously ported library available that provided most of the functionality. Then instead of the AC_ functions substituting slabs of shell scripts into the configure script it could be replaced by a function call to that library. Glenn
