From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-Id: From: Lyndon Nerenberg To: weigelt@metux.de, Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> In-Reply-To: <20080204011921.GD15093@nibiru.local> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed; delsp=yes Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v915) Subject: Re: [9fans] A newbie question... Date: Sun, 3 Feb 2008 17:29:47 -0800 References: <46721ee70801311622y709a0d6cme651c10d7b749184@mail.gmail.com> <20080201085043.A5A898663@okapi.maths.tcd.ie> <46721ee70802010915o3309a4d2u3acb9d64eeb56611@mail.gmail.com> <46721ee70802012043h312ec790qa2dc2092169c8b1a@mail.gmail.com> <20080204011921.GD15093@nibiru.local> Cc: Topicbox-Message-UUID: 42c216b8-ead3-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 On 2008-Feb-3, at 17:19 , Enrico Weigelt wrote: > One of the major problem of autoconf is that It tries to guess around > lots of things, and this often fails or is very unclean (it requires > *really great* care to produce good code with it). In fact this has > nothing to do with portable programming, but working around > uncountable > of target specifics. Autoconf is nothing but a stinking rotten corpse that lives only because the cult of GNU adherents cannot (no, refuse to) grok the concept of POSIX. The last time I ever had the requirement to use 'configure' -- that's 'configure', not 'autoconf' in all its splendor -- was circa 1992. And that was solely thanks to Sun unbundling the C compiler, leading to the insane collection of command invocations needed to build something as simple as cat.c.