> > For me I guess it's a philosophical issue. I think the point of > > autoconf is to support a wide range of systems, including systems > > which were created 10 years ago. For example, in 1992 I ported UUCP > > to SVR2 systems which had been built in 1984; autoconf was very > > helpful. > > Yes, but SVR2 was released in April 1984, so it's now nearly a 20-year > old system. Nobody ports to SVR2 any more. Or to SVR3 (released > 1986). These are all dead systems, outside of museums. Perhaps there > are a few of them running production somewhere, but nobody ports > software to them. > > Ultrix 4.0 is a bit newer, but it's pretty much dead as well. There > are still a few hobbyists running ancient Ultrix 4.0 castoff hardware, > I suppose, but the most recent report I found on Usenet of anyone > trying to port software of any kind to Ultrix 4.0 was dated May 1998. ntp still gets build on a Lot of ancient systems, and it uses automake and autoconf. People may not be porting new code to old systems, but code that has been around for a while (like t-uucp) may certainly want to take advantage of recent versions of automake and autoconf. And packages like t-uucp are often needed on those (increasingly rare) occasions where somebody has to keep an ancient system running and talking to other machines. H
