Those are good points about autoconf, John. > I think it would be an interesting project to work on, something nice > and declarative that compiled to portable 'sh'.
Yes, I think that declarative-ish programming has been overhyped by academics, but this particular problem domain seems like a good fit for it. Are you aware of nix? http://nixos.org/ One detail, though, I wouldn't compile to sh. Shell command interpreters themselves aren't that portable (there isn't a good native one on Windows except for cygwin's bash, for example), and compiling to another high-level language seems like a strategic mistake because it makes debugging hard (see my original complaints, and other people's complaints, about autoconf). This hypothetical declarative build tool should Just Do It. Compile the damn program. It works for Python (as I previously mentioned). I think this is a general pattern in design of these tools -- to minimize the degree to which the process involves one tool emitting code that another tool processes. Regards, Zooko _______________________________________________ darcs-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
