Re: configure providing function (Was: Severe performance problem and proposed solution)

[Paul Eggert]

> From: Akim Demaille <address@hidden>
> Date: 13 Mar 2002 10:41:09 +0100

> Actually, all this should be done after an initial step, which is
> equipping configure with means to provide replacement functions.  I'm
> think about something like
> 
>         ./configure --replacement-function=ln -s from to
> 
>         ./configure --replacement-function=echo "Hello world"
> 
> and so forth.

Hmm, won't this make configure scripts harder to read and generate,
and slower to boot?  Perhaps I'm missing something here....

How about this idea instead.  Let the configure script contain code
that looks like this:

  ln -s from to
  echo "Hello world"

in both cases assuming the POSIX.1-2001 semantics.

On hosts that don't have the standard semantics, supply either a shell
function (if supported) or a shell script prepended to the PATH (if
shell functions don't work) that has the desired semantics.

This approach would be easier to explain for people writing
configure.ac files, as they can assume the standard semantics for
standard shell utilities.  They won't have use fancy Autoconf macros
to invoke standard shell utilities.