Re: proposal to fork the build-tools projects

[Dean Povey]

>> (im not an expert on autotools and this may sound simplistic, but
>> FWIW) Ive often wondered why ./configure has to be a script, i
>> understand it has to be portable, but couldnt the build tools compile
>> a binary that calls on a c library that provides most of the
>> functionality. 
>
>Maybe I am the one now who is totally not getting it, but:
>
>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.

-- 
Dean Povey,             |em: address@hidden|JCSI: Java security toolkit
Wedgetail Communications|ph:  +61 7 3023 5139   |uPKI: Embedded/C PKI toolkit
Level 14, 388 Queen St, |fax: +61 7 3023 5199   |uSSL: Embedded/C SSL toolkit
Brisbane, Australia     |www: www.wedgetail.com |XML Security: XML Signatures