On 20/03/18 22:53, Russell Shaw wrote:
On 20/03/18 21:07, R. Diez wrote:
...
Requiring a POSIX shell in the next version is an improvement, but POSIX is
too limiting to really help. It is 2018. No wonder so many people want to
ditch Autoconf!
Autoconf is hard to learn because becoming properly familiar with shell
programming is hard enough for new shell hackers, let alone figuring out the
several versions of Bourne-like shells around and their extensions, plus reading
all that posix standards stuff, then having to read all about and mastering M4.
An alternative way to portability would be to ditch M4 so that everything is
done directly in a shell that comes with autoconf. The shell could have inbuilt
functions for the common things needed like regular expressions etc.
I'll need to reword that.
If autoconf'd programs required the end users to have an installation-shell that
is ported to all systems of interest, then the learning requirements of autoconf
users should be a lot less.
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