> > I hated the old-sytle perl configs that asked me all sorts of
> > questions, which I had to research to answer. If it automatically
> > figures out correct defaults, fine. If it takes a guess just based on
> > the result of `uname`, that isn't so great.
>
> Same about GNU configure, with one exception: it doesn't ask you.
> If it figures it out correctly, fine. If it doesn't, oops.
>
> Apart from that, there is a thing which GNU configure promises
> but sometimes fails to deliver, which is building a package from
> the same source tree on various platforms. And, of course, I'm
> not sorry to repeat it, different config files for different
> platforms are one hell of a feature in Exim's Makefiles. I don't
> want to remember that to compile Exim on SunOS, I need to say,
> among 20 different flags (no, not less),
> "--with-perl=/usr/local/bin/perl" and on AIX "--without-perl".
> And, of course, "--bin-directory=/usr/local/lib/exim" and
> "--spool-directory-mode=0770". I've had too many half-KB
> configure command lines to type in my life. Forgot --with-slang?
> Reconfigure, recompile, relink! Happened to me.
>
> Vadik.
>
> P.S. Long Live Philip Hazel And The Guy Who Created Exim's
> Makefile Structure! Hurray, Hurray, Hurray!
>
This entire discussion is taking on far more of a life than I intended
it to! However, if you are generating 1/2Kb command lines then perhaps
you should consider doing it in vi, like all sane people? Also the idea
is that you only have to do it once per configuration - and then copy the
config command to whichever machine you wish to configure/compile the new
exim on.. However there is nothing to say that you can't edit the
makefile after configuring anyway... *shrug*
This was all meant to be a conveniance thing!
Julian
Unix Admin, Internet Vision
--
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http://www.exim.org/ ***
