On Jun 2, 2014, at 11:35 AM, John Cowan <cowan(a)mercury.ccil.org> wrote:
arnold(a)skeeve.com scripsit:
This is only possible because of the
standardization efforts at the
C and POSIX levels. Remember that Autoconf/Automake were invented to
solve the issue of all the forks: SunOS / Solaris / HP-UX / Ultrix /
MIPS / Pryamid / DG-UX / ad nauseum. Lots of things that were almost but
not quite entirely like V7 or System V Unix.
Oh, absolutely. But Autotools themselves are very unstable, so we've
apparently replaced spatial variation with longitudinal variation.
The Chicken project was undergoing too much churn trying to run correctly
with different installed versions of Autotools. So we switched to CMake,
but that was even more unstable, and couldn't handle a bootstrapped
self-compiler well.
So finally we switched to the current scheme of Makefile fragments.
Each fragment specifies appropriate cc and ld options, including libraries
required, and then writes out a chicken-defaults.h file with a bunch of
HAVE_* macros. That's all that's needed.
Sounds a bit like imake-uberlite… Or should I not mention imake lest the love-fest for
all things evil continue on it. :)
Warner