[Info-vax] Looking into C-include files on VMS

[Joerg Schilling]

In article <7l3bsvF3a4r6dU2 at mid.individual.net>,
Bob Eager  <rde42 at spamcop.net> wrote:

>Of course, that's what you have to do; think in the paradigm of the 
>current system. Each system has its own merits, and neither is "better" 
>than the other. VMS heavyweight processes are, however, a pain at times. 
>The problem with 'configure' is that it was designed to handle 
>portability problems across UNIX systems, and was never designed for 
>something as different as VMS. And many UNIX adherents think that 
>'configure' is a crock anyway.
>
>And yes, I've done a lot of programming on both systems; 26 years on VMS 
>and 33 on UNIX...

Then you should know that "configure" implements ideas (fine grained tests)
that have been developed by the OpenSource movement in the late 1970 to the
early 1980s. The basic idea is to use few commands that may be easily ported
by hand before. These commands are part of POSIX anyway, so any OS should
have them since aprox. 20 years.

The list of needed commands is: 

        -       sed
        -       rm
        -       egrep
        -       grep
        -       tr
        -       uname   
        -       chmod
        -       expr
        -       false
        -       cat
        -       echo
        -       cp
        -       cmp
        -       mv
        -       ls
        -       [
        -       test

If you however follow the documentation from the FSF that comes with the
"autoconf" project, you make a mistake and then you are indeed at the dark
side of the force ;-)

If you follow the autoconf documentation, you will end up with a lot of
cut/paste parts in your sources and if one of these parts is broken, you
will have look for all the places and fix many places.

This is why the Schily Makefilesystem does not use "autoconf" the way
it is documented by the FSF but the way it makes sense.

In my portability framework, everything exists just once and if you find a bug, 
you only need to find and fix one single place.

-- 
EMail:joerg at schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
      js at cs.tu-berlin.de		(uni)  
      joerg.schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
URL:  http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily