From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v749.3) In-Reply-To: <405533c54ed442f7dab4dbba9be35491@collyer.net> References: <405533c54ed442f7dab4dbba9be35491@collyer.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; delsp=yes; format=flowed Message-Id: <2F49EE4B-7504-4BEF-AF05-C7260C2E61E7@telus.net> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: Paul Lalonde Subject: Re: [9fans] impressive Date: Mon, 8 May 2006 18:18:26 -0700 To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Topicbox-Message-UUID: 4f883de8-ead1-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Part of the problem is that autoconf also tries, weakly, to deal with cross-compilation. It simultaneously gets blamed for the crap make systems that surround most larger systems - recursive make invocations that simply don't have enough of the tree to build non- trivial systems well. Put those two elements together and you get a real mess. On 8-May-06, at 4:31 PM, geoff@collyer.net wrote: >> what does the path out look like? > > Writing portable code? When autoconf was created, there was some > incompatibility in system call and library interfaces amongst (l)unix > systems. Since ANSI/ISO C and POSIX, much of what autoconf was > originally intended to paper over is now standardised on (l)unix > systems, which is all that autoconf is intended to cover, I believe. > > There are still fringe functions that only some systems have, and > autoconf now attempts to probe the outer limits of weirdness, but I > suspect that few programs *need* to use the fringe. And where > necessary, one can provide alternate implementations of some > higher-level abstraction in different .c or .h files. > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (Darwin) iD8DBQFEX+3ipJeHo/Fbu1wRAugmAJ9zYNPlXC7fvmvHD7AUkKeqLkUfogCfb98j mJzIM9ErhSXhjYpqTBCs6Es= =5887 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----