As a followup, the xterm author maintains his own autoconf forks at https://invisible-island.net/autoconf/. They don’t hang on my system like the newer ones shipped by m4 and nano.
Also, I tried iffe and it works like a charm even on the V7 Bourne shell. The feature tests are also much nicer to write than their m4 equivalents, e.g., here’s the one I wrote for musl: tst need64 -D_LARGEFILE64_SOURCE note{ off64_t necessary }end nocompile{ #include <sys/types.h> typedef off64_t __ast_off64_t__; typedef off_t __ast_off_t__; extern __ast_off64_t__ x; __ast_off_t__ x; }end fail{ echo "#undef _typ_off64_t" }end Kind regards, Lev > On Jan 20, 2021, at 17:23, Lev <int...@mailbox.org> wrote: > > Hi Chase, > > It’s not that the autotools suite is bad per se, but my opinion is that > they’re somewhat GNU-centric. For instance, trying to get it working on > UnixWare (which still gets patches from Xinuos, and I wonder if they’d give a > free license for CDE developers), it immediately errors out because of an > incompatibility with ‘rm -f’ (you have to set ACCEPT_INFERIOR_RM_PROGRAM.) It > then doesn’t want to work with UNIX m4, asking the user to install GNU m4, > but then that requires autoconf too… > > I think you’ve done great work getting CDE to work with the new ksh93, and > I’ve submitted a patch to get it working with UnixWare > (https://github.com/ksh93/ksh/pull/159) and restoring ISO C90 support. In the > process of porting it, I also found a stack corruption error, which goes to > show that portability can potentially benefit all users. > > I don’t intend to compete with or split the CDE community or anything. My > thought was that if I’m doing the work to port CDE, I might as well share it > with others if the only alternative for them is no CDE at all. I still want > to submit patches and consider this the CDE upstream and I apologize if I > came across otherwise. > > Kind regards, > Lev > >> On Jan 20, 2021, at 15:56, Chase <nicetry...@protonmail.ch> wrote: >> >> Lev, >> I just don't understand what the big issue with autotools is. We gutted a >> lot of the legacy OS code a few years ago (ultrix, unixware, even weird ones >> like uxpds), but if someone were to want these platforms back, I feel that >> using autotools would be an even better solution, since autotools supports >> building and feature testing on all these platforms, and instead of having >> big chunks of ifdef OS you can just implement features tests, whereas imake >> stopped receiving updates in 2000, and imake in general stopped being >> supported in 2014. I was the one that really spearheaded that we use >> autotools since it has a much larger platform support base than cmake or >> meson do, and I did so in case someone really wanted to bring back the old >> platform support. >> >> I'd really like you to see the light on this one, if theres one thing that >> CDE doesn't need, its a fork. >> >> >> Thank you for your time, >> -Chase >> >> ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ >> On Tuesday, January 19, 2021 10:52 PM, Lev via cdesktopenv-devel >> <cdesktopenv-devel@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote: >> >>> Hello, >>> >>> I intend on porting CDE/Motif 2.1 to SVR4 and possibly other niche >>> platforms, so I’ve set up a branch at https://github.com/lev105/cde-imake/ >>> so as to not interfere with the good work here to get CDE up to date with >>> the autotools suite, etc. >>> >>> Without being able to test on a SVID3-compliant OS, it’s difficult for me >>> to be able to gauge which changes risk worsening compatibility with older >>> systems, and CDE is a wonderful, lightweight desktop for them. Like a lot >>> of other folks, this will be something I balance in a small amount of free >>> time, but I hope these efforts will be useful for others. I’ve already got >>> fairly extensive changes to support compiling CDE on platforms without XPG >>> internationalization, and I am going to try getting fixes upstream for CDE >>> and ksh93 (looks like musl support has already been committed) if they fit >>> within their respective roadmaps. Maybe I could adopt imake if there >>> wouldn’t be any objection? >>> >>> Kind regards, >>> Lev >>> >>> cdesktopenv-devel mailing list >>> cdesktopenv-devel@lists.sourceforge.net >>> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/cdesktopenv-devel >> >> > _______________________________________________ cdesktopenv-devel mailing list cdesktopenv-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/cdesktopenv-devel