Re: Autoconf and apt

[Allan Clark]

On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 17:14, Bob Friesenhahn <address@hidden
> wrote:

> On Tue, 19 Aug 2008, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
>
>> IMVHO any kind of repetition of knowledge encoded in rpm and apt
>> (or system vendor X package) databases is not tolerable, if it needs to
>> be hand-maintained in any way.  It's just too much data, getting out of
>> date, and too many distributions.
>>
>
> I don't understand.  Wikipedia only knows about 242 Linux distributions.
>  What's the big deal?
>
> Of course there are at least five *BSD distributions, maybe five
> OpenSolaris distributions, Darwin, BeOS, AmigaOS, Plan 9, and Oberon. Maybe
> that is what you are worried about?
>
> It seems that the world would be a simpler place if the world could
> standardize on just one distribution such as the one called "Windows Vista".
>  Then we would not need Autoconf.
>

Heh.  Jokes aside, I figured there's a good chance that the same "project"
(ie http://freshmeat.net/projects/{PROJECT} or http://{PROJECT}.sf.net/)
provides the same deliverables cross-platform.  For example, the libz on
Solaris, Redhat, UNIX, and BeOS probably comes from project "libz", and so
"libz" or the URL to a libz-maintained translation (ie
http://freshmeat.net/projects-xml/zlib/zlib.xml ):

AC_MSG_ERROR([Missing component libz probably provided by project
http://freshmeat.net/projects-xml/zlib/zlib.xml or package zlib.])

(this message is maintained by the project that is dependent on libz.so, but
zlib maintains the freshmeat record or some http://zlib.sf.net/autoconf.xmlfile)

Can you see how *this* is static across UNIX, Linux, BeOS, and Solaris?

Allan
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