// Since the purpose of ape is to emulate the environment
// configure is expected to run in...
false premise. the purpose of ape is to provide an ANSI/POSIX environment.
it's purpose is as much for outbound porting as inbound, and maintaining the
actual target is more important in that direction.
the purpose of *conf* is to match the environment it finds itself in. as such,
submitting modifications to that is clearly the correct long-term plan. you're
correct that modifications to *conf* won't help already-distributed packages,
but that seems like not a very good reason to give up the nicely specified
target for ape ("ANSI/POSIX Environment" being a lot easier to define
than "Whatever-Gnu-Assumes-This-Week Environment"). having something
else,
not ape, targeted at broader compatibility might also be useful (some people
have complained about ape's need for defining symbols to use non-ANSI
libraries, for example), but it's a different enough objective that it
ought to be
a different thing (GAPE?).
