[TUHS] Tools and building: libtool, autoconf, etc. [ trying to have a relevant subject line ]

[Larry McVoy]

+1.  BitKeeper runs on a ton of platforms and we have no love nor no
need for autoconf.  

On Thu, Sep 14, 2017 at 04:32:41PM -0400, Ron Natalie wrote:
> Autoconf didn't originate with Gnu.   It was around longer than that
> (someone can probably remember, but I remember some of the netnews software
> using it long before RMS or LINUX got going).
> I always havd a lot of distatste for it.     I worked on portable software
> as well, everything form Unipress EMACS to BRL CAD to my own software
> products (we ran on, let me see if I can recall:   SUN both Solaris and the
> old SunOS4, Stellar, Ardent, HP (both architectures), Apollo, SGI (various
> levels), DEC MIPS, DEC ALPHA, RS6000, iTanium, i8t0 (several flavors), the
> 80x86 in many flavors, Intergraph 32032, Intergraph Clipper...
> 
> We were always able to disttill the portability information into a single
> set of include files, one conf.h and one included for each platform.    Most
> of the grief came from people with various ideas on how to do 64 bit seeks
> and of all things (thankfully we got away from this) stty/ioctl.
> 
> I never had to resort to a script to set things up.   Reading down through
> conf.h told me what my options were and it didn't take long to set things
> up.
> 
> I also ported/wrote X11 servers for four or five systems (including writing
> my own CFB24 before MIT released theres).    iMake worked pretty well,
> though since it relied on the C prepropcessor and the exacxt format of the C
> preprocessor output really isn't defined for white space, it sometimes was a
> problem.    Eventually, we picked up CMAKE though I don't particularly like
> that one either.

-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm