Re: just one of a million reasons why autoconf is a worthless piece of shit (2)

[Keith Marshall]

On Tuesday 18 March 2008 02:28, John W. Eaton wrote:
> On 17-Mar-2008, Keith Marshall wrote:
> | I've recently ported Andries Brouwer's, (now Federico Lucifredi's),
> | variant of John Eaton's man program, for use with MSYS, under
> | MS-Windows.  That package came with a hand crafted configure
> | script, which "wasn't worth the effort of autoconfiscating, because
> | its requirements were so modest".
>
> I hope I'm not responsible for that.  However, it's been a long time
> and I can't remember, so it is possible that the bad configure script
> is derived from something I wrote.  It may even be fairly likely,

I really couldn't say; it was Andries who made the above comment, maybe 
not in those exact words, but certainly to that effect.

> BTW, it seems unfortunate to me that there are now (at least) two
> separate versions of man based on what I wrote.

Unfortunate indeed, and now I've forked it again!  Neither Andries nor 
Federico seemed keen on the idea of exposing a public VCS repository, 
(which would have made it so much easier for us to co-operate, with me 
working on the Win32 port, while maintaining sync with their mainstream 
updates), so I've created one for my port:
http://mingw.cvs.sourceforge.net/mingw/man/

> The man-db sources do include an autoconf-generated configure script. 
> Why not use that version instead?

I did consider it, but it has evolved into a more complex codebase, and 
apart from the lack of a good configure script, my initial attempts to 
compile each of them suggested that I would encounter fewer porting 
issues with the version I eventually chose; indeed, I had working code 
within a matter of days, after manually hacking the files configure 
should have generated, albeit lacking i18n features.  Besides, the 
exercise of autoconfiscating it gave me a good opportunity to learn how 
to use autoconf for a full scale project, rather than simply patching 
someone else's existing configuration code.

Regards,
Keith.
> jwe
>
>
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