On 9 February 2012 18:23, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: > > FUD. I've spent significant time with autotools documentation. > If I could be bothered (which I can't), I could point to lots of things in that early prereq script which dont conform even one little bit to how you are supposed to use autoconf.
> > > see his early attempt at the "prereq" configure script, which was > written to > > be processed by autoconf. Just about every reccomendation in the manual > was > > ignored. > > The manuals suck. > I disagree. > > > I still feel that what is being proposed is very vague. Is it to > deprecate all of these variables [1] (but still fully support them for > at least one year!), and make them options to a ./configure script? > > http://sagemath.org/doc/installation/source.html#environment-variables > > And, merge that with the current prereq autoconf code? Is that the > proposal? > There would be advantages to portability, even amoungst Linux users. One of the main concepts of the autotools is that you don't make choices based on the platform, but test the complete system (OS/compiler/linker etc). So instead of having endless workaround on specific distributions, you create a test (in C usually), that shows if the issue exists or not. Then you apply the workaround if the issue exists. Instead of testing for a SPARC processor if you have code which is big-endian/little endian specific, you should write a test which checks if the system is big/little endian. Then it automatically will work on any new big-endian processor. If something is an issue on Debian, instead of checking for Debian, you write a test for the problem. Then you have solved the issue for any system - one derrived from Debian, or even something completely differet. We have a patch which get added on Solaris sometimes, as there's a bug in a library, which has been fixed by a Sun patch. So one should write a test which checks if the bug exists or not. I think you would find that by doing away with a lot of patches which are applied on certain Linux distributions, you would get code which would work more easily on more There's a lot to be said for using autotools, but I would agree they are not the easiest tools to use, and I fear we might not get the full benefit. Dave -- 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
