"Paul Eggert" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > "Braden McDaniel" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > The Coin <http://coin3d.org> folks have solved this by using a wrapper that > > translates the POSIX arguments to cl-ese. I'm wondering (1) if such a thing > > as this would be considered a useful addition to autoconf itself; > > Yes. However, we'd need help to maintain it. I don't use cl or > Windows, for example. > > > and (2), if so, what kind of requirements it would need to meet > > (i.e., presumably it ought to be written in sh). > > That would normally be one requirement. However, if cl in practice is > always run on a platform that uses some other shell, it'd be OK to use > that shell. I.e., if everybody who uses cl uses command.exe (or > whatever the other shell is), and if sh is not universally available, > then you might as well use command.exe.
If sh is not available, presumably there would be substantial difficulty in using autoconf/configure at all. In practice, I think there are very few projects using cl with autoconf. But I want to use autotools, and building with cl is a requirement for the project I'm working on. So hopefully I can come up with a general solution to the problem. > A couple of other requirements: > > * The changes should be decoupled from the rest of Autoconf. We > shouldn't have to have the equivalent of "#ifdef DOS" all over the > place. Of course; avoiding that kind of thing is very much the point of the wrapper. > * The author of the changes would need to sign the copyright over to > the FSF. I don't anticipate a problem. I'm glad there's interest. -- Braden McDaniel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Software Engineer, Object Sciences Corporation
