Petter Reinholdtsen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Part of the problem seem to be that the configure script tests for OS > and architecture, not if the needed features are present or not. This > of course makes it fail on all new OS/architecture combination, as > well as old combinations when the feature set changes over time.
This is not exactly the case. We do check for "features" (if I understand that term correctly), however features are not necessarily as reliable as you'd like and the inferences that you may draw from them vary depending on the platform. Thus we use knowledge about the platform (1) to conditionalize inferences (2) make platform specific inferences and guesses or override inferences that are known not to work. We also expressedly do NOT want to merely accidentally support a platform: platforms are explicitly added when someone actually puts in the effort for a port and can confirm that the system builds and passes the test suite (unfortunately, platform support tends not to be removed when no longer actively maintained, resulting in some bit rot). While transparently accommodating new OS/architectures is reasonably possible for most software, it is not realistic for a VM with complex memory management (tagged pointers, tagged data, GC), support for concurrent computations, and protocols to support distributed data, distributed computations, and mobile objects. Cheers, -- Dr. Denys Duchier [EMAIL PROTECTED] Forschungsbereich Programmiersysteme (Programming Systems Lab) Universitaet des Saarlandes, Geb. 45 http://www.ps.uni-sb.de/~duchier Postfach 15 11 50 Phone: +49 681 302 5618 66041 Saarbruecken, Germany Fax: +49 681 302 5615 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
