[Mingw-users] Re: How to meet these cross-platform C++ project goals?

[<rr...@cs...>]

Earnie Boyd wrote:
>I would suggest you look to autoconf, automake and libtool for the 
>solution to this problem.

He seems to have already looked very closely at using those tools.

>They have many years of experience and it is their purpose to provide
>cross platform compliance when building software source sets.

Not exactly.  The purpose of Autoconf is to generate scripts for
configuring software on Unix-like system.  Even within that limitted
domain of "cross platform compliance", it's purpose is only to assist
the developer in providing that compliance.  The burden primarily
falls on the developer to identify any potential compatibilty problems,
instruct autoconf to test for them, and to make any necessary changes
to project's source code.  The are plenty of crappy packages out there
that use autoconf yet don't work on anything other than i386 Linux.

Automake's job is to generate makefiles that conform to the GNU coding
standards.  It leaves portability issues to autoconf and the developer.
And libtool... well, I suppose it's better than it used to be.

Given the set of libraries required by the project, it doesn't look like
a high degree of portability is required or possible.  Using autoconf
for the Unix-like systems, and treating Windows (without MSYS or Cygwin)
and maybe VMS as special cases would probably be managable.  Expect to
learn the hard way how very much different Unix-like systems can be.

					Ross Ridge