Re: [9fans] Re: configure misery

[Lucio De Re <lucio@proxima.alt.za>]

On Mon, Nov 17, 2003 at 02:28:09PM +0200, Aharon Robbins wrote:
>
> That is surprising to me.  I haven't looked at FreeBSD, but this makes it
> sound like they've put the library in some non-standard place, since the
> machinery as distributed is supposed to be able to find it, AND, since
> gawk ships with a copy of the gettext library, use the one in the source
> distribution if it can't find one on the system.
>
> So, this is a guess only, the FreeBSD people seem to have made this work
> for themselves.
>
They may have done what NetBSD did, which is to use a directory
hierarchy for the distribution packages which is unique to them
(/usr/pkg).  You probably know this.

If you want to engage the autoconf people, then high on my wish
list is to be able to distribute the answers for one tarball to
all the others tarballs that can use them (can I say MS Registry?
Yes, I can) so that configure does not have to repeat itself ad
nauseam.

I actually think Geoff has a philosophically more sound approach,
where a single i386-lucent-plan9-config.h is more sensible than
figuring it out each time.  Again, I can't help thinking it ought
to be a hierarchical structure.

++L