Patch for configure.in for SCO OpenServer 5.0.X and UnixWare 7.1.0

Russ Allbery rra at stanford.edu
Fri Sep 3 12:38:07 UTC 1999


Boyd Lynn Gerber (801) 250-O795 Work <gerberb at zenez.com> writes:

> I have attached a patch for configure.in against the inn-2.2.1
> distribution.  I also have patches for ltconfig and ltmain.sh for
> libtool.

I have several questions about this patch, if you have a moment to answer
them.

First of all, what problem is it that you're trying to solve here?  You
didn't give any information in either your message or in comments in the
patch, and the patch itself is scant on details.

Second, you've introduced a function named AC_SYS_COMPILER_FLAG.  This is
a bad name for a function in a configure.in script, since the AC_*
namespace is reserved for autoconf itself.  This change risks conflicting
with future versions of autoconf.  The function should use an INN_ prefix
instead (I know that a lot of 2.2.1 gets this wrong, but 2.3 should get
this right).

Third, you're specifically checking for a particular operating system.  I
assue that this is related to the -belf flag that you're adding?  Why is
this necessary?  Does it apply to other operating systems?  Checks
specific to a particular operating system should be avoided whenever
possible in favor of checking for the availability of features.

Fourth, finding and then running uname is the wrong way to check for
something specific to an operating system; the right way is to run
config.guess and parse the output of that.  Otherwise, one ends up
reimplementing all of the complexity in config.guess to deal with systems
that don't have uname, etc.

Fifth, a nit:  There's no need to declare CFLAGS, LDFLAGS, etc. as output
variables, since they're on the predeclared list.

I'm working, when I can find the time, on redoing the build system of INN
for 2.3, and I'm worried about changes like yours since unless I can
follow what a part of configure is trying to accomplish, I don't know if
it should be retained, if it's now irrelevant, or if there's some better
way of doing what it's trying to do.

As an aside, ltconfig and ltmain.sh are *way* out of date and libtool
doesn't work correctly currently anyway.  I plan on revisiting all of that
at some point, but there were other things I wanted to get cleaned up
first.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)         <URL:http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>


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