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Date:	Fri, 01 Nov 2013 11:00:02 +0100
From:	Juan Manuel Guerrero <juan DOT guerrero AT gmx DOT de>
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To:	djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject:	Re: New version of autotools?
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Reply-To:	djgpp AT delorie DOT com

Am 31.10.2013 13:40, schrieb Georg Potthast:
> Hi Juan,
>
> thank you for the new grep version. Do you think you could port a later version of the autotools to djgpp? I have trouble porting some applications to DOS since the autotools currently available on the djgpp site seem not to work with these makefiles.
>
> Georg

Sorry but this will not happen in the near future.  To be able to make a
useful port of automake we need a really working port of perl.  My last
perl port misses a lot of necessary things like file locking and the dos
specific emulation of fork (See the failure of the Make test suite reported
by me in the Make announcement).  Porting perl can only be done by someone
that is a fluent programmer of perl.  A great part of perl is composed by
the perl modules written in the perl language and these need to be adjusted
to the DOS peculiarities.  The perl porter needs to be really capable of the
perl language, needs to understand POSIX because this is the native OS of
perl and needs to understand DOS and the differences between DOS and POSIX
and how DJGPP can be used to overcome this differences.  If I would start
a perl port I would estimate that I would need one year of porting time.
This estimation is realistic; please note that I maintain the ports of a lot
of other programs also and the efforts for these other ports cannot be
stopped only to get faster a perl port.

Yesterday I have downloaded latest autoconf and configured it.  The configuration
aborted telling me that at least m4 1.4.16 or later is required.  I am working on
the next port of m4 but it will not be finished until I have not finished the
ports of libiconv and gettext that I am working on.

IMHO, ports of autotools are not really required for porting things to DOS using
DJGPP.  I have been porting since more than 10 years for DJGPP and usually writing
a couple of sed scripts that modify the Makefile.in and the configure script
is enough to get a working configuration script that creates DJGPP specific Makefiles.

IMO, absolute prerequisites _BEFORE_ starting porting autotools would be to have
reliably working ports of the latest versions of bash, coreutils and perl.  As long
as we do not have these fundamental tools we do not waist time with secondary tools
like autotools.  IMO ports of bash and coreutils will not be easier and less time
consumming than porting perl.

When we have autotools we would need to write DJGPP/DOS specific modules for autoconf
and automake to be able to create configure scripts and Makfile.ins that deals with
DJGPP/DOS peculiarities.  These modules need to be submitted to the autotools maintainers
and asked for inclusion in the autotools.  During the last years I have observed
how gnu maintainers have systematically eradicated DOS/DJGPP support from their
packages, so I do not think that they will ever include DOS specific modules.
Their target are POSIX like operating systems and they support windows supporting
mingw and nothing else.

Regards,
Juan M. Guerrero

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