From: Geoff Thorpe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
geoff> > Somethine like 2 years ago, probably more, I offered a set of diffs
geoff> > from SSLeay 0.8.1 which make it use automake and autoconf. I was
geoff>
geoff> This is my personal opinion, so I'd wait till a couple of the
geoff> other developers reply before trying to draw any kind of
geoff> impression about the attitude "from the project" about the
geoff> idea(s).
I would actually be quite positive to autoconf if it wasn't for two
things in it that I view as flaws:
1) really heavy (to the level of magic) on sh features, making it
really difficult to deal with when something goes wrong, and
making portability a royal pain.
2) Depends on m4 which, although it's a pretty darn powerfull macro
processor, also comes with the problems a macro processor of that
caliber almost has to have, including processing pieces of text
you never thought of.
Those two things come from my experience with porting autoconf 1 to
create DCL (the standard shell on VMS) scripts instead of sh ones and
getting about 1/3 of the way with autoconf 2 (I gave up when the sh
code became too magic for my comprehension back then).
I've pondered a number of times to create a similar tool that relies
on some scripting language that has spread beyond the realm of Unix.
Those I know of are Perl and Python, where Perl is definitely the most
well spread... There was a rumour that there was an autoconf-like
tool that generated perl scripts, but I never found it, so I guess it
was exactly that, a rumour.
Anyhow, that's my two cents on autoconf. If a group of people were
willing to work on something autoconf-like that generates perl, I'm
in!
My feelings about automake are, if anything, divided. I'm not sure I
understand it completely, and I've been told that you can get in real
trouble if you happen to mishandle it, which isn't too hard, it
seems. I'll have to look a bit more before I've a real opinion about
it.
--
Richard Levitte \ Spannv�gen 38, II \ [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Chairman@Stacken \ S-168 35 BROMMA \ T: +46-8-26 52 47
Redakteur@Stacken \ SWEDEN \ or +46-709-50 36 10
Procurator Odiosus Ex Infernis -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Member of the OpenSSL development team: http://www.openssl.org/
Software Engineer, Celo Communications: http://www.celocom.com/
Unsolicited commercial email is subject to an archival fee of $400.
See <http://www.stacken.kth.se/~levitte/mail/> for more info.
______________________________________________________________________
OpenSSL Project http://www.openssl.org
Development Mailing List [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Automated List Manager [EMAIL PROTECTED]
