Re: A better autogen.sh

[Paul Eggert]

On 03/15/2011 10:53 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> It will be, if there's a practical way to know how to update the
> private config.in without having a Posix platform nearby.

The same way you know now.  Somebody sends email.
Or, perhaps Emacs doesn't build on MS Windows, and
the diagnostics reveal the problem.

Other possibilities include running GNU/Linux under a virtual
machine on a Windows machine; or running Autoconf and Automake
under Windows, and then generating config.in directly
on the Windows machine.  Or one can grab a recent pretest
version.

This is not an exhaustive list.
There are other simple and practical ways to address
this problem, which don't require putting
automatically-generated output into the repository.

>> This would lessen the need for tight coupling between the mainline and
>> the DOS version.
> What "tight coupling"?

Currently, when I edit files under src/ and src-lib/,
I often have to worry about porting to MS Windows or MS-DOS.
There are many #ifdefs and similar constructs that complicate
the code, and are needed only because of the MS ports.
It would be better if this porting code were isolated
to the msdos/ and nt/ directories, so that developers
under GNU and GNUish systems did not have to look at it
or worry about it.

The src/config.in file is one example of these #ifdef-like
constructs.  The main reason we put src/config.in in the
repository, and keep track of it and commit it by hand,
is for the MS Windows port.  If we can think of another
way to handle this, it would save us work.

Moving src/config.in to msdos/config.in is one way to do that.
It may require a bit more work on the part of the Windows
developers, but it'll require less work from the rest of us,
and overall it will be a win.