X-Authentication-Warning: delorie.com: mail set sender to djgpp-bounces using -f X-Recipient: djgpp AT delorie DOT com Message-ID: <52737BA2.6060507@gmx.de> Date: Fri, 01 Nov 2013 11:00:02 +0100 From: Juan Manuel Guerrero User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:16.0) Gecko/20121025 Thunderbird/16.0.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com Subject: Re: New version of autotools? References: <535c9b42-9a81-4d11-a73b-aba5d1be65f2 AT googlegroups DOT com> In-Reply-To: <535c9b42-9a81-4d11-a73b-aba5d1be65f2@googlegroups.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Provags-ID: V03:K0:PhPVU88apbFnO9R2dAds/hgTAHN0QECfK+yeylbUGP46RqaM+xP MhgE8DQ2tS3EaZr0+4b6+iizQEvDO8k1gplq0e42cGPiKn1Kua0S5sLuVlpsZZZiuev510s qqe6MeI3/ewxgZ4XneuZf+7oKoii7Yefl9gsTX+fdeZTFMliD+tBQfVvtjofeO6LmUg31Mu OBho70lm2Sjmo8AH9ovRw== Reply-To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com Am 31.10.2013 13:40, schrieb Georg Potthast: > Hi Juan, > > thank you for the new grep version. Do you think you could port a later version of the autotools to djgpp? I have trouble porting some applications to DOS since the autotools currently available on the djgpp site seem not to work with these makefiles. > > Georg Sorry but this will not happen in the near future. To be able to make a useful port of automake we need a really working port of perl. My last perl port misses a lot of necessary things like file locking and the dos specific emulation of fork (See the failure of the Make test suite reported by me in the Make announcement). Porting perl can only be done by someone that is a fluent programmer of perl. A great part of perl is composed by the perl modules written in the perl language and these need to be adjusted to the DOS peculiarities. The perl porter needs to be really capable of the perl language, needs to understand POSIX because this is the native OS of perl and needs to understand DOS and the differences between DOS and POSIX and how DJGPP can be used to overcome this differences. If I would start a perl port I would estimate that I would need one year of porting time. This estimation is realistic; please note that I maintain the ports of a lot of other programs also and the efforts for these other ports cannot be stopped only to get faster a perl port. Yesterday I have downloaded latest autoconf and configured it. The configuration aborted telling me that at least m4 1.4.16 or later is required. I am working on the next port of m4 but it will not be finished until I have not finished the ports of libiconv and gettext that I am working on. IMHO, ports of autotools are not really required for porting things to DOS using DJGPP. I have been porting since more than 10 years for DJGPP and usually writing a couple of sed scripts that modify the Makefile.in and the configure script is enough to get a working configuration script that creates DJGPP specific Makefiles. IMO, absolute prerequisites _BEFORE_ starting porting autotools would be to have reliably working ports of the latest versions of bash, coreutils and perl. As long as we do not have these fundamental tools we do not waist time with secondary tools like autotools. IMO ports of bash and coreutils will not be easier and less time consumming than porting perl. When we have autotools we would need to write DJGPP/DOS specific modules for autoconf and automake to be able to create configure scripts and Makfile.ins that deals with DJGPP/DOS peculiarities. These modules need to be submitted to the autotools maintainers and asked for inclusion in the autotools. During the last years I have observed how gnu maintainers have systematically eradicated DOS/DJGPP support from their packages, so I do not think that they will ever include DOS specific modules. Their target are POSIX like operating systems and they support windows supporting mingw and nothing else. Regards, Juan M. Guerrero