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From: Paul Lalonde <plalonde@telus.net>
Subject: Re: [9fans] impressive
Date: Mon,  8 May 2006 14:18:18 -0700
To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
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Having been swearing at autoconf (and the code it causes) for much of  
a week, I can vouch for the brain damage.
Consider that at best it returns a list of available features; some  
of them are inferred by running the compiler, others by testing the  
environment.  Try cross-compiling with that kind of mess.
So after running configure, I get to hand-edit the resulting file and  
*try* to catch all the places where autocrap checked if /dev/ 
something existed, because all those are guaranteed wrong (some OSes  
don't have a /dev/...).
And the code people write to work around what autoconf says is at  
least as evil.  Python's posixmodule.c goes at least 5 levels of  
ifdefs deep, with no hope of figuring out which bits are for which  
platform.  I'd rather just re-write the whole module.

Paul

On 8-May-06, at 2:10 PM, Jack Johnson wrote:

> On 5/8/06, LiteStar numnums <litestar@gmail.com> wrote:
>> seems. So for the half
>> our conformity test/configuration, it still wouldn't actually tell  
>> me what
>> was really missing, which was
>> fun because it kept passing the thread test sections...
>
> So, it sounds like autoconf may function as intended but perhaps the
> person who wrote the test needs some help?
>
> Given that progress is likely to be evolutionary rather than
> revolutionary, what kind of system or environment do you see that has
> potential to wean people from autoconf with as minimal hassle as
> possible?  If I'm engrossed in autoconf hell for whatever reason --
> say I'm the Firefox build maintainer, for instance -- what does the
> path out look like?
>
> -Jack

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