Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Installation woes (Re: Passing on unwanted groups)
Message-ID: <1990Aug27.162625.16251@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <3ND5KOC@xds13.ferranti.com> <5fq0f2.zm6@smurf.sub.org> <1990Aug24.165844.3563@zoo.toronto.edu> <1990Aug26.085636.19024@pegasus.com>
Date: Mon, 27 Aug 90 16:26:25 GMT

In article <1990Aug26.085636.19024@pegasus.com> richard@pegasus.com (Richard Foulk) writes:
>>You might want to make a list of the things "build" asks you, and figure
>>out which ones could be guessed automatically.  Not very many.
>
>At least half.

I make it 24 out of 78, even being generous and assuming doing some
automatic experiments which could possibly be dangerous.  And some of
those would require confirmation anyway, and the guessing code would
fail on some machines.

Simply asking a single question for all the str/mem functions -- a change
I am considering -- would cut out fully half of those guessable answers.
-- 
Committees do harm merely by existing. | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
                       -Freeman Dyson  |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry