Re: [9fans] Two suggestions for ape (was: egrep for Plan9)

[Dmitry Golubovsky <golubovsky@gmail.com>]

On Oct 26, 9:21 am, 23h...@googlemail.com (hiro) wrote:
> > Since the purpose of ape is to emulate the environment configure is
> > expected to run in, and such mismatch has been found, it migh be
> > easier to fix ape than to convince maintaners of autoconf to fix on
> > their side...
>
> Why are you so sure they wouldn't fix it? Have you or has anybody you
> know tried something like this already?

Because even if they fix it in the current (or perhaps the nearest
future) version (in repos now) of autoconf this would not apply
retroactively to previous/current versions everyone has.

Besides, one thing (very long regexp to match all ASCII letters and
numbers in a CPP directive - see the thread on awk incompatibility) is
done on purpose: they specifically wanted to avoid character ranges
(perhaps wrt some locales where a-z range might also include letters
with diacritics, but this is only my guess). Regexp buffer length
limitation in Plan9 awk may be more fundamental problem.

Well, these problems arise only if one wants to have a port for Plan9
share the sources with upstream (hence to have common configure
scripts, Makefiles, tools, etc.)

If a fork-style port for Plan9 is considered then of course everything
may be adjusted properly (like configure is not needed at all because
there is only one
configuration, etc.).

Thanks.