On 7 February 2012 16:38, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 3:42 PM, Dr. David Kirkby > <david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote: > > On 02/ 6/12 09:09 AM, Jeroen Demeyer wrote: > >> > >> On 2012-02-06 09:33, Dr. David Kirkby wrote: > >>> > >>> I think trying to replicate autotools would be just silly. > >> > >> That's what PARI tried and they are probably the spkg with the *most* > >> patches to the configuration system. > >> > > > > More fool them. > > I am not suggesting *replicating* autotools. I'm suggesting that we > should clearly identify exactly what this "./configure" is supposed to > accomplish before deciding on what tool to use to implement it. > Autconf may or may not be the right choice. > > -- William >
I think from a user's perspective, if he/she sees a "configure" script, they are likely to assume it behaves the same way as 95+% of other configure scripts. They probably will not know or care how it was created, but they will probably appreciate if it works like most others. I maintain a chess program http://chessdb.sourceforge.net/ originally written by someone else. That has a "configure" script that is NOT generated by autoconf. I think that was a bad decision by the original author, as the script behaves differently to most others. Using it is less intuitive than one generated by autoconf. I know there are other packages which have non-autoconf "configure" scripts (I think Perl is one such program), but generally it's a lot easier for a user if the script behaves like he/she has seen so many times in the past, and is familiar with. I've used autoconf on a finite difference program I wrote for modelling transmission lines. http://atlc.sourceforge.net/ That worked very well, and allowed the code to be very portable - it has been built on a Cray supercomputer as well as a Sony Playstation, and pretty much any Unix or Unix-like system. Unfortunately, from a developers point of view, it is not the easiest language to learn, and my experience of many Sage developers would suggest they will not be over keen on studying the details of .autoconf I can't exactly blame them either. -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
