[tex-live] Build of Oct 2, 22:45 source.development fails onMac OS X

Fabrice Popineau fabrice.popineau at supelec.fr
Sun Oct 3 10:37:22 CEST 2004


> As I've already wrote, I have exactly the same problem
> on my Linux box. I cannot update my autoconf without breaking
> so many things... Any clue?

Drop that autoconf stuff.

It is an issue I raised privately with a couple of people. My opinion is
that it does more harm than good. And it also may well refrain potential
developers to join if it is that easy to get stuck.

The real thing behind autoconf is:
1 - it is easy even for a newbie to turn a bunch of .c/.h files into
Makefiles
2 - it simply doesn't scale well.

It would be much simpler to maintain a bunch of makefiles  and c-auto.h for
unixes.

BTW:
1 - the naming for the 'features' that appear in c-auto.h is completely
inconsistent. If you look at various GNU packages, you can find the same
features named 2 or 3 times differently. Not good.
2 - when you want to do too much clever things, you end up sometimes doing
stupid things. Aka generate a 220k shell script for building a 30 lines .h
file. I'm not sure we need that.

Well, that's my opinion. I know I have no chances to convince people here.
But I stated it 'for the record'.

Fabrice



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