Stefan Reinauer schrieb:
Jordan Crouse wrote:
findprog(), trycompile() and trylink() in the configure script are short, fairly easy to understand and hopefully portable enough.
Right - but autoconf scripts are portable _without_ hacking. Thats the whole point.
That's sounds a tiny little bit like an urban legend?
No, just like the premise (and promise) of autotools.
Of course, in practice, things look somewhat different: People who rely on that autoscan (or whatever) tool, see that its result works, and are done with that stupid portability work (except that it only works on their machine, and nowhere else). Incompatible undocumented changes in autotools (it wouldn't be a real GNU project without those). People who get confused by the mix of m4, shell (for every shell since 1975), perl and whatever else crosses their way while they desperately try to write a portable test for some feature in their tool. Tests for everything from maximum command line length to existence of stdio.h and the location of the fortran compiler (for a C app!) while not testing for the actual system differences (third party libraries, real system differences like endianess, ...) And lots of other funny issues with autotools.
But in theory, autotools are a great idea!
Regards, Patrick