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Re: [Nmh-workers] cleaning out the cobwebs

2010-11-03 13:00:37
While I'm not particularly in love with autoconf or automake, my response
to people who say that they hate autoconf is: what do you propose we use
instead?

The POSIX standard.  Everything MH needs in the way of APIs is provided
by POSIX.  By coding to POSIX we eliminate the need for autoconf in the
first place.

In my view, there are two reasons for autoconf:

- Portability tests (all of those tests that make up the bulk of time it takes
  autoconf to run).
- Selecting things like which compiler to use, features to build, install
  location, etc etc

If the goal is to remove all of the reasons for the portability tests in
autoconf, hey, that's great.  Fully support that 100%.  I'm not sure that
will be possible in practice, but there's no reason we can't try.

But what do you want to do about the second set of things autoconf provides?

--Ken

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