Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> 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. 

  In other words, autoconf exists to increase portability. My point exactly.

> 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.

  You seem to have quite many nightmares others don't.

> >   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?

  There are some cases were endianess matters, especially if you are trying
to write low-level efficient code.

  A concrete example which I remember where the program has to behave
differently depending on endianess is mplayer. The source code has to
know the endianess of the target system in order to be able to write
bytes in the proper order.
  (Sure, the code could have been written so that endianess doesn't matter,
but then it wouldn't have been so efficient.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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