Hi Helmut et al, At the Perl 5 hackathon in Amsterdam[1], Niko and I have been working on Configure maintenance with several other core developers (including H.Merijn Brand, who has been the lead/only maintainer of Configure for some years). The conclusions of these discussions are threefold:
1) the previous assertion on this ticket that Configure was, de facto, *a* preferred form of modification was a misunderstanding on our side. I have updated the header for Configure, and the information in Porting/pumpkin.pod, upstream. Hence this bug being reopened. 2) an understanding of the the current mechanism for updating Configure upstream has been shared amongst several people, and the documentation has been improved both in the perl source and in the separate metaconfig repository, which is now on github[2]. It is now much easier for a new contributor to start working on this process upstream (and PRs are welcome there). 2a) There is renewed interest in looking at the dist tools itself, with a view to modernizing them. I'm not sure if the type of cross-building work you might be interested in would be better done there or not. 2b) One issue is that we are still using many older version of units from the upstream dist package, as well as the perl-specific units, but over time this divergence is being reduced. 3) the Debian perl package is in the process of being updated to regenerate Configure in the build process by adding (parts of) the repository to the perl source package as a separate component. Although the upstream metaconfig.git contains a generated version of the tools from dist, we are using the already-packaged version of dist in Debian for this and this doesn't (substantially) change Configure at the moment. I'm therefore hopeful that this bug will be resolved in more satisfactory way very soon, and that this might prove a useful basis for your porting work. Best wishes, Dominic. [1] thanks to the sponsors for this event, listed at http://p5h.org/ [2] <https://github.com/perl5-metaconfig/metaconfig>