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UNIX-ification / POSIX-ification / Linux-ification (Developers)

posted by tkchia Homepage, 15.11.2021, 21:32
(edited by tkchia on 15.11.2021, 23:08)

Hello Rugxulo,

Well, the way I understand it, autoconf — which is, as you might know, behind most of those ./configure scripts — was created precisely for those situations where the build environment might not have a full-fledged POSIX utility suite. In fact the autoconf documentation explicitly states this as a design goal:

> "The problem Autoconf addresses is that the world is a mess. After all, you are using Autoconf in order to have your package compile easily on all sorts of different systems, some of them being extremely hostile. Autoconf itself bears the price for these differences: 'configure' must run on all those systems, and thus 'configure' must limit itself to their lowest common denominator of features."
Furthermore the page you point to

> * https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Utilities-in-Makefiles.html
> > awk cat cmp cp diff echo egrep expr false grep install-info ln ls
> > mkdir mv printf pwd rm rmdir sed sleep sort tar test touch tr true
is just saying that ./configure script and Makefile should not use any programs outside of the above list. (And of course, they do not have to use all the programs that are in the list...)

Naturally, whether autoconf actually satisfies its original design goal is a bit debatable, but saying that autoconf is trying to "make the whole world POSIX" is, I think, not really a fair complaint.

Thank you!

---
https://gitlab.com/tkchia · https://codeberg.org/tkchia · 😴 "MOV AX,0D500H+CMOS_REG_D+NMI"

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