From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
From: David Arnold <davida@pobox.com>
Subject: Re: [9fans] speaking of kenc 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Wed, 02 May 2007 10:00:18 +0100."
	<906cec6503d3ce020b176b39ede09d98@quintile.net> 
Date: Thu,  3 May 2007 11:32:42 +1000
Message-ID: <30901.1178155962@d.0x1.org>
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 56b7b214-ead2-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025

-->"Steve" == Steve Simon <steve@quintile.net> writes:

  Steve> How we can sidestep autohell?

autohell is now a 3-headed beast: automake, autoconf and libtool, where
some of those are actually multiple components.

automake is PERL thing that takes a "simplified" Makefile.am, and emits
a Makefile.in.  its added value is understanding how to drive libtool,
and the creation of Makefiles with standard targets.

autoconf is a Bourne-ish Shell script and a suite of m4 macros.  it
processes various m4 *.in files to produce (at minimum) a Bourne Shell
configure script, and a set of Makefiles.  its added value is two-fold:
a series of HAVE_FOO macros used to compile different code fragments,
and various other variables substituted into the Makefiles to actually
compile and link different files.

libtool is another Bourne-ish Shell script that encodes knowledge of how
shared libraries are built using different linker and runtime-linker
variants.

i suspect that they probably require bash, GNU m4 and GNU sed.  automake
needs PERL.


those porting Python, etc, must have dealt with this somehow?




d