autoconf: Genesis

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1 21.1 Genesis
1 ============
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1 In June 1991 I was maintaining many of the GNU utilities for the Free
1 Software Foundation.  As they were ported to more platforms and more
1 programs were added, the number of `-D' options that users had to
1 select in the makefile (around 20) became burdensome.  Especially for
1 me--I had to test each new release on a bunch of different systems.  So
1 I wrote a little shell script to guess some of the correct settings for
1 the fileutils package, and released it as part of fileutils 2.0.  That
1 `configure' script worked well enough that the next month I adapted it
1 (by hand) to create similar `configure' scripts for several other GNU
1 utilities packages.  Brian Berliner also adapted one of my scripts for
1 his CVS revision control system.
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1    Later that summer, I learned that Richard Stallman and Richard Pixley
1 were developing similar scripts to use in the GNU compiler tools; so I
1 adapted my `configure' scripts to support their evolving interface:
1 using the file name `Makefile.in' as the templates; adding `+srcdir',
1 the first option (of many); and creating `config.status' files.
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