Re: AC_TYPE_SIGNAL obsolete?

[Russ Allbery]

Bob Friesenhahn <address@hidden> writes:

> Since modern OS targets should all be compliant to the current Open Group
> specifications it seems that almost all of Autoconf related to OS-related
> porting must be obsolete!

You're exaggerating to make a point, but indeed, this is mostly true of
the Autoconf macros that many of us used when we first started using
Autoconf.  There's a great deal of stuff that no longer makes any sense
whatsoever to check for.  I no longer bother checking whether memcmp
works, or whether you can include <time.h> and <sys/time.h> at the same
time, or if you have to include <strings.h> instead of <string.h>, or if
the system is missing strdup or strerror, or if bcopy has to be used
instead of memcpy and memmove, or if the arguments of setvbuf are
reversed, or if I need to link with -lintl for strftime.  Just to name a
few.

I consider this progress.  :)

It doesn't make Autoconf less useful.  Autoconf has moved on and has new
tests for new problems that still exist, and as new interfaces are
introduced, there will continue to be portability problems with them.  And
of course one still has to probe for -lsocket and -lnsl.  :)  But indeed,
much of the C portability mess that I learned through trial and error when
porting code between SunOS, ULTRIX, AIX, and NeXTSTEP in the mid 1990s is
now completely irrelevant and obsolete, and thank heavens for that.

-- 
Russ Allbery (address@hidden)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>