[coreboot] r3770 - trunk/util/msrtool

[Patrick Georgi]

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