[Zlib-devel] zlib 1.2.3.6 available for testing

[Vincent Torri]

On Wed, 20 Jan 2010, William A. Rowe Jr. wrote:

> On 1/20/2010 2:26 AM, Vincent Torri wrote:
>>
>> Imho, it will be cleaner if you remove all the Makefile's. Plenty of
>> Makefile's are also difficult to maintain. Most of the OS (linux,
>> solaris, bsd, mac os and windows, which is certainly more than 98% of
>> the OS) can use the autotools. You can keep Visual Studio projects
>> somewhere if you want. Some support should be dropped, like msdos
>> support (we are in 2010)
>
> On the counterargument; zlib really is one of the most portable apps
> in the ecosystem, irrespective of your or my thoughts on which platforms
> remain 'current' :)

keeping support for OS that are not used anymore is completely useless. 
Autotools are a framework used mostly to create Makefiles (they may have 
other uses than creating Makefile's though). In addition, if you have a 
specific compiler and a shell, just do :

CC=my_compiler ./configure

and you'll have the correct Makefile's for your OS. You just have to 
correctly write the configure.ac file.

Vincent Torri