From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <405533c54ed442f7dab4dbba9be35491@collyer.net>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] impressive
Date: Mon,  8 May 2006 16:31:36 -0700
From: geoff@collyer.net
In-Reply-To: <6e35c0620605081410j29c99b28n25bdf7843295d8f0@mail.gmail.com>
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> 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.