From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: References: <06a0be10-d05e-47f4-bebf-c9d9512de2b8@q14g2000vbi.googlegroups.com> <636733be-5009-4311-97ab-dc81634dbd06@p15g2000vbl.googlegroups.co> Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 12:10:25 -0400 Message-ID: <509071940910270910m5682f735l75b50ef55cea4d30@mail.gmail.com> From: Anthony Sorace To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Subject: Re: [9fans] Two suggestions for ape (was: egrep for Plan9) Topicbox-Message-UUID: 919ef3c6-ead5-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 // Since the purpose of ape is to emulate the environment // configure is expected to run in... false premise. the purpose of ape is to provide an ANSI/POSIX environment. it's purpose is as much for outbound porting as inbound, and maintaining the actual target is more important in that direction. the purpose of *conf* is to match the environment it finds itself in. as such, submitting modifications to that is clearly the correct long-term plan. you're correct that modifications to *conf* won't help already-distributed packages, but that seems like not a very good reason to give up the nicely specified target for ape ("ANSI/POSIX Environment" being a lot easier to define than "Whatever-Gnu-Assumes-This-Week Environment"). having something else, not ape, targeted at broader compatibility might also be useful (some people have complained about ape's need for defining symbols to use non-ANSI libraries, for example), but it's a different enough objective that it ought to be a different thing (GAPE?).