Re: [CFT] Shell functionization patch (if you don't know what that means, it's faster Autoconf and leaner configure scripts)

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Mon, 27 Oct 2008, Eric Blake wrote:
> Autoconf already uses perl to convert configure.ac into configure.  I
> think you are asking what it would take to rewrite configure to use perl
> rather than sh.  But what would it buy us?  sh is more portable than perl
> (as measured by the number of platforms where it is included as part of n
> a default bare-bones installation), and starts up considerably faster on

Perl is also quite rapidly losing popularity to other scripting 
languages such as Python and Ruby.  There was an over five year span 
without a Perl release, and with a released Perl which failed to build 
and work on some common platforms.  Building Perl from sources is 
often quite a trial (i.e. it does not use Autoconf) and it is easily 
an order of magnitude more difficult than Python and Ruby.

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/