dispatching

[John W. Eaton]

On 14-Feb-2005, address@hidden <address@hidden> wrote:

| I'd like to know whether the following scenario is possible with
| Autoconf:
| 
| Somewhere early during ./configure, the host type is checked. If it is
| GNU (Hurd), an ordinary build is prepared. (Checking libs, using
| automake-generated makefile etc.) However, if it's Linux, the behaviour
| changes completely: All the ordinary checks are skipped; instead of an
| automake-generated makefile, a simple, hand-written makefile is used,
| with only a couple of configuration variables substituted.
| 
| Will this work? TIA

Yes, you could make something like this work, but why skip the checks
on one system but not others?  What happens if you configure your
software on a system that looks like "Linux" but doesn't actually have
all the features you expect?  Wouldn't it make more sense to perform
all the same feature tests on every system?

jwe