Path: utzoo!yunexus!geac!syntron!jtsv16!uunet!wyse!vsi1!ames!elroy!jpl-devvax!lwall From: lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall) Newsgroups: comp.sources.d Subject: Re: v16i034: Larry Wall's Configure generator, etc., Part01/07 Message-ID: <3412@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV> Date: 25 Oct 88 19:06:56 GMT Article-I.D.: jpl-devv.3412 References: Reply-To: lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall) Organization: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA. Lines: 69 In article jl42+@andrew.cmu.edu (Jay Mathew Libove) writes: : Well, Larry (for the first time I've ever seen) made a number of very : very bad assumptions in his configure distribution. : : 1) that you have Perl. Perl doesn't run on 80286 machines. Not at all. I have some patches to make it run on the 80286. Just haven't had time to integrate them and post them. I think that, in the long run, writing the dist package in perl will turn out to have been the right thing, but I have no illusions about the difficulty this will pose some people who don't have perl ported to their machine yet. But see below. : 2) that your system can deal with a simple makefile unser /bin/csh : without SHELL=/bin/sh in the makefile - SCO Xenix SysV/286 v2.2.1 : breaks here. You have to have the SHELL=/bin/sh. That sounds like a simple thing to fix. In fact, I just did. It'll come out with the next patch. : 3) the Configure that came with the configure package didn't ask : for other CFLAGS and LDFLAGS. Well, you need that on segmented : machines in order to give the model switches, else you have to : hand locate and edit the makefiles to add them. There are no C programs in the whole dist package. Why should the Configure ask for CFLAGS and LDFLAGS? : What happenned Larry? Your utilities used to be the best, and most : portable programs on the net... I assure you, metaconfig IS the best and most portable Configure script generator on the net... :-) Not that it can't be better, of course. I said it when I announced the dist package back about a half-year ago, but I'd better say it again. (In retrospect I should probably have documented this in the README file.) The dist package is not in the same class as the other things I've distributed. Those have been for anybody to use, more or less. The dist package is a response to those people who wanted to use the software that I use to create and maintain the distributions I've done. I wrote the package to please myself primarily, and if anyone else gets some benefit from it, that's fine. And I intend that the tool grow into something that is of use to more people, but in it's current form it is most useful to someone who can read code and dicker with it to make it do what is desirable. There was enough demand for it in that form that I thought it worthwhile to post in that form. The fact that it's written in perl is part of this. In the long run, I expect most systems to have perl. When this comes about, I expect that a program written in perl should be somewhat more portable that a similar C program. Thus long-term portability is enhanced by writing it in perl. That wasn't my primary motivation for writing it in perl, however. It's simply an application that is better expressed in perl, and that makes it easier for me to dicker with it. I'm a very lazy fellow, actually. (On a more sinister level, I suppose some small part of my motivation was to force people to take a better look at perl, but just forget I said that.) :-) Anyway, none of the other programs I've distributed were all that portable at the beginning either. You've just seen this one at an earlier stage of development. I'm sorry I wasn't clear enough about the purpose of this distribution to save you some grief. Larry Wall lwall@jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov