Re: Possible extension, to make porting easier (autoport)

[Michael Still]

On Sat, 28 Apr 2001, Christian Leber wrote:

> Because i was a beginner to autoconf and i've needed a lot of time to
> learn to use only a little bit of the possibilities to make my little
> projekt (sit, cryptographic irc client) a little bit more portable.
> Problems:
> -for what i have to check for?
> -what should i do with all the results?
> -the annoying question: why do i try to make it portable?

There is an existing tool, autoscan, which will go through you code for
you and come up with suggestions about what might need to be included in
your configure.in, based on possible portability issues.

There is also a library of common replacements called libiberty, which
ships with gcc.

The normal way things work (to my humble understanding) is that you just
use memcpy. Autoscan / you should notice that memcpy is broken or missing
on some systems, and include it in configure.in. If ./configure finds
memcpy to be broken or missing on the system that it is compiling on, then
it will substitute the one from libiberty (because you wrote the fail
action in configure.in that way).

I guess what I am saying is that the current situation isn't trivial, but
perhaps your proposed autoport is overkill. I you are finding things that
are not portable, but are not covered by autoscan, then perhaps patching
autoscan is the path of least resistance. Patches to libiberty should also
be possible if required.

Cheers,
Mikal

-- 
Michael Still (address@hidden)
  http://www.stillhq.com -- a whole bunch of Open Source stuff including PDF 
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