Re: Autoconf and apt

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Tue, 19 Aug 2008, Allan Clark wrote:

Heh.  Jokes aside, I figured there's a good chance that the same "project"
(ie http://freshmeat.net/projects/{PROJECT} or http://{PROJECT}.sf.net/)
provides the same deliverables cross-platform.  For example, the libz on
Solaris, Redhat, UNIX, and BeOS probably comes from project "libz", and so
"libz" or the URL to a libz-maintained translation (ie
http://freshmeat.net/projects-xml/zlib/zlib.xml ):

Unfortunately there are many other factors beyond where the most 
recent version of the package came from.  Often a particular version 
of the package is needed, that package needs to be built with certain 
other packages, and certain options and compilation flags need to 
be used.

If humans have extreme difficulty understanding this stuff, it is 
difficult to imagine how it can be automated by a simple shell script.

Freshmeat is a commercial enterprise which may go away tomorrow or be 
purchased by Grim Reaper, Inc., so it should not be referenced by a 
GNU tool.  The FSF maintains its own list of software so that one 
might be a better one to refer to.

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/