There is now a large amount of code in tta/configure.ac testing unessential features including SWIG, embedded Perl interpreters, and conversion of the EUC-CN character set (for the sole benefit of the test suite). Some of these tests have lengthy pieces of C code to be compiled. It is somewhat overwhelming to scroll through and probably obscures the essential workings of the XS module build.
My idea is to keep this code but to "modularise" using separate *.m4 files that would be read by aclocal. I'm going to spend some time working on this. In the future, perhaps there would be some simplification if ctexi2any (embedding a Perl interpreter) became the only implementation. This would only happen if we were able to rewrite enough output converters in C (and overcame other obstacles such as how to do correct Unicode collation without using Perl).
