On Mon, 30 Jul 2007, Tony Finch wrote:
> I also dislike autoconf for the same kind of reasons as Rafal - it usually
> makes non-vanilla builds unreasonably difficult.
I am not in favour of autoconf for Exim - I suspect it is probably
impossible anyway. However, I have to say that using autoconf for PCRE
has probably been a good change. I had to be persuaded into this, but
the clinching factor was that PCRE is a library that needs to be
compiled in shared and static formats on both Unix-like and Windows
systems. The black magic incantations that are needed for shared
libraries are weird and wonderful and not something I know about. All
this stuff is now automatically handled by autoconf, and it does seem to
work for most builds that people actually want. (Previously, I used to
get a steady stream of error reports for the hand-maintained makefile
and it just got more and more hacked.)
--
Philip Hazel University of Cambridge Computing Service
Get the Exim 4 book: http://www.uit.co.uk/exim-book
