Date: Tue, 27 Oct 1998 20:38:05 +0200 (IST)
From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
X-Sender: eliz AT is
To: djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: proposed change to autoconf macro
In-Reply-To: <3634BCC5.E51F468A@montana.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.981027203748.8711L-100000@is>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Reply-To: djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com


On Mon, 26 Oct 1998, bowman wrote:

> In this particular case, that would be my major concern. I do not
> know *nix well enough to know if the [A-z]: string could ever occur
> in a context that would break the script.

FWIW, the maintainer of TeX/Web2C package inserted the [A-z]: stuff
right into aclocal files.  Since TeX supports a lot of Unix platforms,
I deduce that this doesn't do any harm on Unix.

However, since it requires aclocal files, many maintainers can object
to the extra work.  If so, either requesting the DJGPP user to run the
DJGPP port of Autoconf (and have it generate [A-z]: automatically) or
getting config.bat run some Sed or Patch script to make these changes
at configure time, will solve the problem.  (Both solutions were
tested in several ported packages.)

I have a promise from a friendly GNU maintainer to submit a change to
the official Autoconf distribution so that [A-z]: will be
automatically used on DOS/Windows.  When this happens, we could forget
about this hassle.

> resultant shell script to know how to apply the equivalent of 
> 
> #ifdef DJGPP
>   ..... some patch
> #endif.
> 
> that I can do with C/C++ source.

If you really need that, test $COMSPEC in the environment, like so:

   if test -n "$COMSPEC"; then
      do DOS stuff
   else
      do Unix stuff
   fi