At 11:10 AM 10/23/2001 -0400, Michael Fischer wrote:
>On Oct 23, Simon Cozens <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> took up a keyboard and
>banged out
> > On Tue, Oct 23, 2001 at 09:05:33AM -0400, Andy Dougherty wrote:
> > > While imperfect and Unix-centric, we can (and should!) learn a lot
> > > from auto{conf,make} and metaconfig.
> >
> > *nod*. I just had a look around, and most of the other languages are
> > using autoconf. But then, most of the other languages don't run on
> > upwards of 70 platforms. :(
> >
> > I wonder how serious we need to be about keeping that goal.
>
>Surely we can be 'one-more' than the nearest competition, not a few dozen,
>and feel proud?
Screw the competition. We need to be better than we are. That means making
it at least possible to build on the current platform list and then some.
So it's the 70-odd platforms plus the Palm and WinCE... :)
> > > One other thing that nearly all such previous auto-configuration systems
> > > have in common is that nearly every developer of such a system vastly
> > > underestimated the scale and complexity of the task to be undertaken.
> >
> > And that they're all disgustingly difficult to maintain and write
> scripts for.
> > autoconf scares me, and the number of people really good at writing
> metaconfig
> > units can be counted on both thumbs.
>
>FWIW, I vote auto{foo}.
The auto* solutions are essentially Unix only, which leave us in some ways
worse off than we are now, and making it even more difficult for the
non-unix platforms to build. That's the wrong direction to go.
Also, just in general, there's *far* more to the build than just filling in
some #defines and conditional includes of headers. Properly building shared
libraries is terribly linker-specific, and plain compilation's rather
compiler-specific. (Even if you stay on Unix, and things get more
interesting on VMS/Windows/MacOS/MVS/cross-compiling)
We've a lot more to deal with than just figuring out whether we need to
include <string.h> or <strings.h>...
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
[EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk
