On Tuesday 18 March 2008 02:28, John W. Eaton wrote: > On 17-Mar-2008, Keith Marshall wrote: > | I've recently ported Andries Brouwer's, (now Federico Lucifredi's), > | variant of John Eaton's man program, for use with MSYS, under > | MS-Windows. That package came with a hand crafted configure > | script, which "wasn't worth the effort of autoconfiscating, because > | its requirements were so modest". > > I hope I'm not responsible for that. However, it's been a long time > and I can't remember, so it is possible that the bad configure script > is derived from something I wrote. It may even be fairly likely, I really couldn't say; it was Andries who made the above comment, maybe not in those exact words, but certainly to that effect. > BTW, it seems unfortunate to me that there are now (at least) two > separate versions of man based on what I wrote. Unfortunate indeed, and now I've forked it again! Neither Andries nor Federico seemed keen on the idea of exposing a public VCS repository, (which would have made it so much easier for us to co-operate, with me working on the Win32 port, while maintaining sync with their mainstream updates), so I've created one for my port: http://mingw.cvs.sourceforge.net/mingw/man/ > The man-db sources do include an autoconf-generated configure script. > Why not use that version instead? I did consider it, but it has evolved into a more complex codebase, and apart from the lack of a good configure script, my initial attempts to compile each of them suggested that I would encounter fewer porting issues with the version I eventually chose; indeed, I had working code within a matter of days, after manually hacking the files configure should have generated, albeit lacking i18n features. Besides, the exercise of autoconfiscating it gave me a good opportunity to learn how to use autoconf for a full scale project, rather than simply patching someone else's existing configuration code. Regards, Keith. > jwe > > > _______________________________________________ > Autoconf mailing list > Autoconf@xxxxxxx > http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/autoconf _______________________________________________ Autoconf mailing list Autoconf@xxxxxxx http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/autoconf
