🚀 go-pugleaf

   Date: Tue, 15 Sep 92 07:42:26 EDT
   From: pinard%icule.UUCP@Larry.McRCIM.McGill.EDU (Francois Pinard)
   Reply-To: pinard@iro.umontreal.ca

      Configure should correctly figure out the options to use, or it has
      a bug.  You should never need to edit the Makefile produced by GNU
      programs which come with configure.

   These statements look quite strong to me, too strong in fact!  I would
   certainly never expect `configure' to discover all peculiarities and
   strangenesses of all systems and installations.  I'm just speaking for
   Autoconf, which I know better.  There is a certain amount of ugliness
   beyond which GNU configurators should refuse to go.  In these cases,
   we should rather let users correct their own system installation,
   fiddle with config.status (thus, indirectly editing the Makefile), or
   even, in the worst cases, playing with the generated Makefile itself.

   As of now, Autoconf generates configure scripts which behave fairly
   well for almost all machines I work on.  This is a Good Thing, and am
   quite satisfied with it.  This is *far* better than doing all the
   configuring job by hand, as was done before.  It is a very helping
   tool.  But it does not pretend to do everything everywhere and anyhow.
   I feel David Mackenzie has the right attitude on this.

If a program cannot be completely configure by autoconf, then other
things need to be done.  GCC does not use autoconf, but it still needs
no editing to be installed; similarly for gdb and the other
cygnus-maintained utilities.  The coding standards make this quite
clear.  Users should never need to edit machine generated files.

	-mib