Re: just one of a million reasons why autoconf is a worthless piece of shit (2)

[John W. Eaton]

On 17-Mar-2008, Keith Marshall wrote:

| I've recently ported Andries Brouwer's, (now Federico Lucifredi's), 
| variant of John Eaton's man program, for use with MSYS, under 
| MS-Windows.  That package came with a hand crafted configure script, 
| which "wasn't worth the effort of autoconfiscating, because its 
| requirements were so modest".

I hope I'm not responsible for that.  However, it's been a long time
and I can't remember, so it is possible that the bad configure script
is derived from something I wrote.  It may even be fairly likely,
given that my man program was written in 1991 around the same time as
autoconf was first written.  The most recent copy of the man sources
that I have found which predate the time when others started working
on it has an autoconf-generated configure script, but I'm not sure
that it was ever distributed.  I lost interest in maintaining it when
another project started to consume all my time...

BTW, it seems unfortunate to me that there are now (at least) two
separate versions of man based on what I wrote.  The man-db sources do
include an autoconf-generated configure script.  Why not use that
version instead?

jwe