On 20/03/18 21:07, R. Diez wrote:
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Requiring a POSIX shell in the next version is an improvement, but POSIX is too limiting to really help. It is 2018. No wonder so many people want to ditch Autoconf!
Autoconf is hard to learn because becoming properly familiar with shell programming is hard enough for new shell hackers, let alone figuring out the several versions of Bourne-like shells around and their extensions, plus reading all that posix standards stuff, then having to read all about and mastering M4.
An alternative way to portability would be to ditch M4 so that everything is done directly in a shell that comes with autoconf. The shell could have inbuilt functions for the common things needed like regular expressions etc.
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