Re: converting netkit to autoconf?

[Peter Eisentraut]

Russ Allbery writes:

> The most that's really acceptable is to ask the programmer to provide a
> test case that fails, and the interface for doing that has to be as
> clean as possible and involve as little distortion of the original test
> code as possible.

I think Autoconf does a fairly good job in what you describe.  You can
pretty much do anything with AC_TRY_COMPILE, all the other tests are just
convenience wrappers.  I think the real issue is that the system quirks
never fail to be original, so writing robust test cases requires knowledge
of the programming language, and Autoconf can't help there.

OK, quoting is tricky, but quoting is an issue in other languages, too, so
the difference is only one of degree.

Autoconf, like most languages, has evolved.  Like, say, Java evolved from
C and Perl evolved from, uh, many things, Autoconf evolved from plain
shell, which has historically provided a migration path and to this day
makes users see something familiar in all the new stuff.

-- 
Peter Eisentraut   address@hidden