Re: Autoconf, DOS and NT (was Ebcdic rule)

[Paul Eggert]

> From: Mike Castle <address@hidden>
> Date: Thu, 4 Oct 2001 12:40:50 -0700
> 
> > My understanding is that bare DOS is not UNIX-like, but it gets
> > reasonably UNIX-like if you add enough 3rd-party software.  Similarly
> > for NT.
> 
> And so can EBCDIC based systems.

I'm not opposed to using Autoconf on EBCDIC based systems that have
POSIX support.  Such systems are required by POSIX to behave as if the
character set is a superset of ASCII when operating in the "C" or
"POSIX" locale.  This is relatively easy to support.

However, I don't think that the autoconf maintainers should spend much
time worrying about environments where the character set does not
conform to POSIX.  Such environments are too painful to port to, and
are too rare nowadays to be worth worrying about.  I'm not just
referring to EBCDIC here; I'm also referring to national variants of
ISO 646, which are also dying on the vine.

The original EBCDIC request that spawned this thread was satisfied
without any change to Autoconf.  So I would let the issue of non-POSIX
character sets die, unless someone can demonstrate an important
practical need for them.