autoconf: Deuteronomy

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1 21.5 Deuteronomy
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1 
1 A long wish list for major features had accumulated, and the effect of
1 several years of patching by various people had left some residual
1 cruft.  In April 1994, while working for Cygnus Support, I began a major
1 revision of Autoconf.  I added most of the features of the Cygnus
1 `configure' that Autoconf had lacked, largely by adapting the relevant
1 parts of Cygnus `configure' with the help of david zuhn and Ken
1 Raeburn.  These features include support for using `config.sub',
1 `config.guess', `--host', and `--target'; making links to files; and
1 running `configure' scripts in subdirectories.  Adding these features
1 enabled Ken to convert GNU `as', and Rob Savoye to convert DejaGNU, to
1 using Autoconf.
1 
1    I added more features in response to other peoples' requests.  Many
1 people had asked for `configure' scripts to share the results of the
1 checks between runs, because (particularly when configuring a large
1 source tree, like Cygnus does) they were frustratingly slow.  Mike
1 Haertel suggested adding site-specific initialization scripts.  People
1 distributing software that had to unpack on MS-DOS asked for a way to
1 override the `.in' extension on the file names, which produced file
1 names like `config.h.in' containing two dots.  Jim Avera did an
1 extensive examination of the problems with quoting in `AC_DEFINE' and
1 `AC_SUBST'; his insights led to significant improvements.  Richard
1 Stallman asked that compiler output be sent to `config.log' instead of
1 `/dev/null', to help people debug the Emacs `configure' script.
1 
1    I made some other changes because of my dissatisfaction with the
1 quality of the program.  I made the messages showing results of the
1 checks less ambiguous, always printing a result.  I regularized the
1 names of the macros and cleaned up coding style inconsistencies.  I
1 added some auxiliary utilities that I had developed to help convert
1 source code packages to use Autoconf.  With the help of Franc,ois
1 Pinard, I made the macros not interrupt each others' messages.  (That
1 feature revealed some performance bottlenecks in GNU M4, which he
1 hastily corrected!)  I reorganized the documentation around problems
1 people want to solve.  And I began a test suite, because experience had
1 shown that Autoconf has a pronounced tendency to regress when we change
1 it.
1 
1    Again, several alpha testers gave invaluable feedback, especially
1 Franc,ois Pinard, Jim Meyering, Karl Berry, Rob Savoye, Ken Raeburn,
1 and Mark Eichin.
1 
1    Finally, version 2.0 was ready.  And there was much rejoicing.  (And
1 I have free time again.  I think.  Yeah, right.)
1