Pretty wild statement, especially considering the existance of the Cygwin Net Release. As far as I am aware, all packages contained in it are built using an autoconf-based ./configure script. Check out http://cygwin.com/. They use their own customized install agent (http://cygwin.com/setup.exe) for binary releases, which are downloaded as Slackware-style tarballs, and standard source tarballs that are patched when need be for source installs.
If we are all honest with ourselves, autoconf on Windows and the whole cygwin project is really just a moderately successful attempt to port applications designed for, and written for, UNIX to Windows without having to completely rewrite the applications for Windows.
Ok, so what's your point? Yes, cygwin contains ports of unix tools. But people still run them on windows and use them to build native win32 applications.
When I see Norton SystemWorks or McAfee SpamKiller using cygwin, then I'll consider cygwin a viable development platform for Windows. Until then, it's just a port.
How about Netscape? The cygwin tools are used to build native win32 versions of the Netscape/Mozilla applications (using either MSVC or gcc compilers). And the win32 versions are definitely not ports (we had more win32 programmers than other for a long time) nor do they depend upon cygwin at runtime. And what's to say the applications that you mentioned don't use cygwin/autoconf? If properly packaged, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference anyway.
I really don't understand why being a port is such a big deal. The port is still a windows binary and therefore, it still invalidates the claim that "nobody uses autoconf on windows".
- cls
