lynx-dev Re: Building Lynx2-8-4 - when did complicated/undebuggable "configure" scripts become the norm?

[Webmaster Jim]

On Tue, Feb 27, 2001 at 11:26:24AM -0500, Thomas E. Dickey wrote:
> On Tue, 27 Feb 2001, Malcolm Boekhoff wrote:
> > The question asked by this posting is: "Why isn't Lynx linking?".
> > I am trying to build Lynx on NT4 with Cygwin (using bash), but, as
> > usual when things don't go quite right, I need to find out which one
> > of the 200 command-line "configure" arguments I need.
> > Why can't we have just have a makefile instead of having to create
> > the makefile from a 16000 line shell script that is pretty much
> > un-debuggable?

> if you really do understand makefiles, constructing one manually from
> makefile.in is not a big deal. unfortunately this is not the case for
> most people. (the makefile before the configure script had roughly 50
> platform/library combinations, and about half did not really build).

If somone contributes a makefile for cygwin, it would probably go
into the distribution, as we also have makefiles for MS and Borland
compilers. The Borland makefile is still working (I use it sometimes),
but new features won't be compiled in unless someone maintains those
files.

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