autoconf does two things:
1. It figures out the values to various questions, such as "do you need
sys/time.h before
time.h?" and "do you have strcasecmp". It records those
answers in a set of variables.
2. It uses those variables to edit a bunch of
files, substiting templates with the real answers.
It is possible to separate those two pieces for non-
Unix platforms. For example, look at how CNews and INN
did their configuration. INN included a highly portable
C program that did step 2. You write a config file that
has lines like
CC cc
INCL -I../inc
etc. And a program called "subst" reads these var/value
lines and edits a specified list of files.
It's not a lot of work to write a system that does this.
For example, in autoconf you'd write something like
this in Makefile.in
CC = @CC@
and "configure" will create a Makefile that has, say,
CC = gcc
If, instead, the line were replaced with
# =@()<CC= @<CC>@>()=
CC = @CC@
Then both systems work.
If someone gives me an OpenSSL xxx.in file that does
basic autoconf support, I'll do a quickie subst support.
This way Unix platforms get things automatically, and
other platforms have a single config file to edit,
and prototypes/samples can be included in the distro.
/r$
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