autoconf: Numbers

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1 21.4 Numbers
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1 In July 1992, after months of alpha testing, I released Autoconf 1.0,
1 and converted many GNU packages to use it.  I was surprised by how
1 positive the reaction to it was.  More people started using it than I
1 could keep track of, including people working on software that wasn't
1 part of the GNU Project (such as TCL, FSP, and Kerberos V5).  Autoconf
1 continued to improve rapidly, as many people using the `configure'
1 scripts reported problems they encountered.
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1    Autoconf turned out to be a good torture test for M4 implementations.
1 Unix M4 started to dump core because of the length of the macros that
1 Autoconf defined, and several bugs showed up in GNU M4 as well.
1 Eventually, we realized that we needed to use some features that only
1 GNU M4 has.  4.3BSD M4, in particular, has an impoverished set of
1 builtin macros; the System V version is better, but still doesn't
1 provide everything we need.
1 
1    More development occurred as people put Autoconf under more stresses
1 (and to uses I hadn't anticipated).  Karl Berry added checks for X11.
1 david zuhn contributed C++ support.  Franc,ois Pinard made it diagnose
1 invalid arguments.  Jim Blandy bravely coerced it into configuring GNU
1 Emacs, laying the groundwork for several later improvements.  Roland
1 McGrath got it to configure the GNU C Library, wrote the `autoheader'
1 script to automate the creation of C header file templates, and added a
1 `--verbose' option to `configure'.  Noah Friedman added the
1 `--autoconf-dir' option and `AC_MACRODIR' environment variable.  (He
1 also coined the term "autoconfiscate" to mean "adapt a software package
1 to use Autoconf".)  Roland and Noah improved the quoting protection in
1 `AC_DEFINE' and fixed many bugs, especially when I got sick of dealing
1 with portability problems from February through June, 1993.
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