Re: proposal to fork the build-tools projects

[Glenn McGrath]

On Tue, 15 Oct 2002 05:38:49 +1000
Dean Povey <address@hidden> wrote:

> >How could you distribute a binary to run on all the different kinds of
> >systems? I use Cygwin and MinGW. Am I going to be excluded from Open
> >Source packages because the package maintainer decided not to provide
> >such a binary? I don't follow the logic here. Are you saying that the
> >package maintainer will compile a binary "./configure" using h[er|is]
> >"build tools"? Or are you saying each end user will first unroll the
> >tarball and then build a binary "./configure" (the latter being the
> >only way that seems to make sense). Then you still have the problem of
> >the C library. I assume if the latter, that there will be a canonical
> >download location (+ mirrors) for precompiled libraries (on my
> >platform(s), that means Windoze DLLs)? 
> 
> The easiest way would be for ./configure to find the C compiler and
> build a simple utility binary from source, then use that for the rest of
> the configuration.
> 

I was thinking something like that, but to avoid a catch22, it would
require the platform have a previously ported library available that
provided most of the functionality.

Then instead of the AC_ functions substituting slabs of shell scripts into
the configure script it could be replaced by a function call to that
library.




Glenn