Re: Building Subversion 1.2 on OS X 10.4 fails

On May 11, 2005, at 9:52 PM, Scott Palmer wrote:
>
> To be honest I find the entire process of "./configure" utterly
> ridiculous.

Perhaps you don't remember what the world was like before autoconf
existed? Eek.

> For example: It checks for things like stdlib.h - if you have a C
> compiler that doesn't have this file you have much bigger problems
> than compiling subversion. It checks for fortran compilers - why?
> subversion is written in C. I could go on, but the point is that
> the massive amount of "checking" just goes to show that there is
> something so fundamentally wrong with the entire process that it
> just makes me sad.

Fundamentally wrong? autoconf solves the problem of portability
better than anyone could have possibly dreamed of 20 years ago.
There's a reason it's the "standard'. Is it pleasant? No. Does it
greet you in the morning with french toast, the daily paper, and a
smile? No. Does it alleviate tremendous portability pain? Absolutely.

The behavior you're seeing is simply a bunch of pre-packaged tests
that are par for the course, part of the standard AC macros.
Subversion doesn't care about stdlib or fortran, it just asks that a
C compiler and preprocessor be present:

(from configure.in:)

dnl Look for a C compiler (before anything can set CFLAGS)
AC_PROG_CC

dnl Look for a C pre-processor
AC_PROG_CPP

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Received on Thu May 12 05:13:58 2005