[Info-vax] CLI editing, was: Re: VMS - Virtual Terminals - A security risk way back yonder OR was that an Old Wives Tale ?

[John Reagan]

On Monday, February 15, 2016 at 1:50:19 PM UTC-5, terry-... at glaver.org wrote:
> On Monday, February 15, 2016 at 11:45:05 AM UTC-5, li... at openmailbox.org wrote:
> > The autotools scripts often break on anything besides Linux. I can't count
> > the times I've had problems with them on Solaris or OpenBSD. Most Linux
> > apps are simply not tested on anything but Linux and gcc and bash and then
> > only on Intel hardware, so the foregoing should come as a surprise to
> > nobody. The problem isn't only autotools or configure, but it certainly
> > starts there. And as soon as you add non-Intel hardware, non-bash POSIX
> > shell, or a non-gcc compiler to the equation the fun begins.
> 
> VSI (or other folks porting GNUish stuff to VMS) might want to look at the work that's been done in the FreeBSD* ports tree** to reduce dependencies on GNU stuff. 

configure/make are certainly showing their age.  For example, the next release of LLVM will no longer support being built with configure/make.  They will require CMake as the build tool.  (They support both forms today)

For building LLVM on OpenVMS, I told LLVM's configure script that I was building with icc.  If I asked for 'gcc', it made lots of assumptions that the entire toolchain was GCC derived.  I did have to do a few manual edits on the resulting config.status mostly around the confusion around C99 headers and some cc options that it assumed that everybody implements.