Warp wrote:

>   Autoconf exists because not all systems have the same tools or libraries
> installed, nor all systems have the same versions of those tools/libraries.

As far as I can tell, autoconf exists because some systems use BSD awk 
and others use GNU awk, and the two aren't precisely compatible. 
Multiply this by the 50,000 other tiny utilities you may or may not need 
to set up this program and you have a configuration nightmare so bad it 
requires an automated tool to make things remotely tractable.

And it seems to me that most of this has happened because the entire 
system has been poked and prodded by so many different people over time 
that you now have a huge tangled mass of different implementations all 
of which are only semi-compatible.

>   Autoconf also exists because computer architectures are different.
> For instance, some architectures may be little-endian while others are
> big-endian. Some architectures may be 32-bit while others are 64-bit.

Shouldn't the compiler be dealing with those issues?

>   Portability is a key feature of unix-like systems.

That I don't have a problem with... ;-)

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