Setting aside the use of M4, which is another abomination, M4 is quite a good choice for this.
the fundamental design flaw in autoconf is that it tests compatibility by executing programs on the target platform rather than consulting a database. I don't know of any test that does this that is distributed with autoconf. Maybe you mean tests that people have writtten, then this is true, but then it isn't a flaw in the test not in autoconf. Also, you can make autoconf use a database, it is called a config.cache file, and I often use it for bash 2.x which had a broken set of tests (3.x fixed this, instead it just defaults to some semi-sane value and spits out a warning). how exactly do you test the integer size on a cross target? By not depending on the integer size. Have you tried building a cross compiler lately with GCC? I have, quite easy, far easier than it was a few years ago. Finally, the design of autoconf does not promote portability. It does promote portability. But people are often ignorant as to writting good configure.ac scripts, which is a pita if you try to write your own specific tests. But it is a less pain than writting the old Makefiles with a bazillion macros that you need to define manually. _______________________________________________ L4-hurd mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/l4-hurd
