Re: Status of Mac OS/X ports of git and cogito?

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Sep 11, 2005, 23:18 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.63.0509120115500.10414@wgmdd8.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.58.0509111043430.3242@g5.osdl.org>

Hi,

On Sun, 11 Sep 2005, Linus Torvalds wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

> I personally think autoconf is the devils tool, and have had much more 
> luck with
> 
>  - creating "compat" libraries that implement functions that some 
>    configurations don't have.
> 
>    Sometimes this involves renaming the function, in order to avoid 
>    clashes with broken implementations of same.

That was the original idea of autoconf...

>  - just ignoring the really broken systems (old HP-UX etc is terminally 
>    diseased, and simply not worth worrying about)

... which is sometimes no option.

> autoconf generates an unreadable mess that can't be fixed. Doing it by 
> hand at least means you can fix it.

A real pity! autoconf showed great promise in the first days. But then they started using m4 and other crud crept in.

All that said, autoconf still makes it easy to make a program or library portable. However, for git it would be overkill.

Ciao, Dscho