On Wed, 2 Oct 2019, Warren Young wrote:
That’s not reality, though we are approaching it slowly. “Real” Unix is all but dead now, the Linuxes are converging on a few major types, and the fragmentation in the BSDs seems to have reached a practical limit. Alternatives like macOS and Windows WSL hew to one of the above standards. The OS compatibility problems we have these days are nowhere near as bad as those in which the Autotools were created.
“Real” Unix seems to be doing fine to me. It is available in free software form with a strong developer base.
I do agree with your notion of convergence on common standards, and that is what has been happening continually since the late 1980s.
It is no longer necessary to test for 'echo' since 'printf' is now commonly available (for a long time) and works reliably.
Many existing common tests found in Autoconf scripts can just be removed since standards have made them unnecessary.
Bob -- Bob Friesenhahn bfriesen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/ GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/ Public Key, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/public-key.txt _______________________________________________ Autoconf mailing list Autoconf@xxxxxxx https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/autoconf
