Re: Multi-platform build system

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Miles Bader writes:

 > [Another somewhat rare property of autoconf is the emphasis on
 > feature-_testing_ instead of version/system-name-driven configuration;
 > this may be less useful on windows, which seems to have a smaller
 > amount of variability, but of course it's invaluable on unixy
 > systems...]

XEmacs's experience is to some degree the opposite, especially for
those users who can't do any configuration themselves.  Specifically,
as we have a lot of optional features which require libraries that are
non-standard on Windows (Windows provides the functionality in
proprietary libraries with different APIs in most cases), but are
typically provided by free OSes.  So on Debian you'll just have libpng
or zlib, but on Windows you typically need to install them or have the
configuration script tell the makefiles not to link them.

It's true that core APIs like the exact definition of a time_t or
whether SIGIO is broken vary less on Windows, but it's always been a
PITA that autoconf only works for Cygwin builds on Windows from the
point of view of adding new bells and whistles, because for native
builds people's config.inc include file for config.bat often breaks
and they have to edit them by hand.