Re: [9fans] A newbie question...

[lucio@proxima.alt.za]

> Main trouble in 1 step. Because after that i couldn't post in project
> mail list, "Hey gays, i have create Plan9 port of your application,
> please check it out and put in CVS trunk".

There's no cure for this.  The touted portability of the autotools is
restricted to the GNU environment and the moment you step outside of
it, this is what occurs.  It's a philosophy that has turned into a
religion largely by losing its focus or, if you prefer, shifting its
objective.

Plan 9 becomes the proof thereof, if autotools were as successful as
claimed, it ought to be trivial to port them to a different platform.
It isn't, nor is it necessary.  In porting the code for libtiff and
geotiff to Plan 9 I added a few "mkfiles" to zlib, the jpeg tools,
png, gd and eventually libtiff and geotiff.  The sum total of these
mkfiles is probably less than two thousand lines.  But it is
impossible to feed these back to the developers, because they do not
fit into their philosophical scheme.

As another example, check out graphviz.  From version 1 to version 2
(I think) they moved from a custom configurator to the autotools.
Beside totally losing Plan 9 portability in the bargain, it is my
impression that they spent more effort on the autotools details than
in improving graphviz itself.

++L