[darcs-users] down with autoconf

David Roundy daveroundy at gmail.com
Fri May 16 16:09:33 UTC 2008


On Thu, May 15, 2008 at 9:54 AM, Jason Dagit <dagit at codersbase.com> wrote:
> In the case of darcs I would say the real issues keeping darcs from being a
> first class citizen on windows are 1) it's too hard to build on windows 2)
> the majority of windows users (including the windows programmers I know)
> either don't like or don't know how to use the command line on windows.
> TortoiseDarcs is aimed at solving #2.  I think getting rid of autotools for
> the windows build helps with #1.  We can keep autotools for the other
> builds.  If the cabal configuration can be made to not rely on autotools I
> would say having the windows build work via cabal and all the other builds
> use the autotools build is an acceptable way to go.  Or replace cabal with
> franchise if appropriate.

Cabal doesn't yet aim to replace autotools, so it isn't an option.
Franchise doesn't yet have the functionality implemented, and
absolutely noone has shown any interest in it.  So unless we want to
introduce a python requirement (since there do seem to be autoconf
replacements built in python), I think we're pretty much stuck with
autoconf.

It's true that with cabal, Zooko wouldn't spent a day hacking to try
to get configure to behave right, but that's only because we could
have told him that cabal doesn't behave right on any platform, so he
wouldn't have felt like windows was being  discriminated against.

David


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