RE: astksh review

["Karsten Fleischer" <K dot Fleischer at omnium dot de>]

> People, let me introduce you to a "gift horse."  Please stop 
> inspecting 
> its teeth.
> 
> Karsten and others have done a lot of work to accomodate the cygwin 
> packaging standard.  It is *extremely* disrepectful for us 
> (the cygwin 
> community, as it were) to then insist on *internal* changes to the 
> product itself.

Thank you, Chuck.

> e.g. "Stop using nmake and this really confusing Makefile 
> system.  Use 
> autoconf"

After two and a half years of working with package/nmake/iffe etc. I got
so used to their build system that I find the autotools really
confusing.

[...]
> ast-ksh uses a Makefile-driven build system.  

Actually there's more to that.

> It is not autoconfed.  It never will be autoconfed.  

Right, never.

> And if it WERE to be autoconfed, 

Never, never, never.

> that discussion would belong over on the ast-ksh mailing list, 

You could also shoot yourself in the foot.

> because you're 
> talking about massive overall changes to the upstream package, not 
> simply cygwin-specific porting tweaks.

Right.
Some people seems to think that configure/make is the only way to build
from source packages.
Basically, the ideas behind autoconf and AT&T's iffe/nmake are the same.
The approaches are different: autoconf creates global configure files
that go through all of the tests needed for the whole package before you
build, nmake and iffe run these tests during the build process when
needed locally.
That means you don't have to go through the all the feature tests when
you just want to change the installation directory for example.

We'll provide in-depth information on the build system with the cygwin
ast-ksh source package for interested users.

Karsten