Eric Schnoebelen <eric@cirr.com> wrote: : However, Autoconf doesn't support the idea of asking the : _anything_. *Everything* has to be known in advance, and placed : on the configuration script command line. Not really true. You just have to write the Autoconf macro that will query the user for values. The set of macros that comes with Autoconf doesn't do this of course, because the fundamental idea is that everything should be detected automatically or configured on the command line. That's how Autoconf configure scripts *should* work, but noone can really stop us from adding interactivity to the configure script. I've written hundreds of autoconf macros - even have write- access to the Autoconf sources (I was active as an Autoconf maintainer in the 2.13->2.5[012] upgrade process), and making a hybrid, interactive configure script should be a piece of cake for an experienced Autoconf/Bourne shell programmer. I don't want to surprise people by making a configure script be interactive by default though, but I wouldn't mind having an option for turning on this kind of thing, and/or letting the configure script turn on interactivity if it is invoked as Configure instead of configure (but having files with both names would cause problems in the case of case-insensitive file systems though, so that might not be such a good idea). Nevertheless, most people (just my educated guess) who download and build sources off the net are most familiar with the Autoconf way - they may not even have encountered any Metaconf-based packages at all before they are going to try compiling the newly released trn4-final. (perl is usually installed by default on all Linux distributions). To those people, the current system will seem very clunky, and that's my main argument for reworking the build system. We need a stream-lined setup if trn is ever to take over the world ;) Btw, does Metaconf set up makefiles that can build the package in separate build directories, so you don't have to clutter up the source directories with object files and stuff? That's another thing I can hardly live without these days... Lars J ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.NET email is sponsored by: SourceForge Enterprise Edition + IBM + LinuxWorld = Something 2 See! http://www.vasoftware.com
