Mail Archives: djgpp-workers/1997/01/21/01:45:41
On Sun, 19 Jan 1997, Mark Habersack wrote:
> Wouldn't it be possible to pre-generate config scripts with bash on your machine and
> distribute them along with the sources? That way you have all the birds in
> your hand: someone who doesn't have bash/tools already has a pre-configured
> package and someone else with bash/tools can reconfigure it at will. Or is
> that solution not flexible enough?
It doesn't work this way at all. The configure script is itself a shell
script which requires a Unix shell to run; that's where the port of bash
comes in handy. The generation of configure scripts is done by a totally
different tool (GNU autoconf, based on the m4 macro-processor); when you
get a source release of any GNU package, that part is already done by the
person who released that package. But you cannot *run* configure unless
you have a Unix shell.
What configure scripts do is to probe the system for existence and names
of various programs (such as the C compiler and preprocessor) and support
for some non-standard functions and header files. The script then
automatically generates the Makefiles and the local "config.h" header so
you only have to say "make" and watch the stuff build itself. DJGPP
comes with <sys/config.h> which takes care of most of the second part,
but creating Makefiles is still a job to be done for every ported
package, and it needs to be redone with every new release of a package,
even if a previous version has already been ported, because some major
releases change the package too much.
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