configure-less Perl builds

[Simon Cozens <simon@brecon.co.uk>]

It's that time again.

Building on Ilya's experimental patches, I've managed to produce a
`crazyperl' which builds on as many systems as I've got handy, out of
the box, without any configuration stage at all. Weeee!

(I'll make the patch available by FTP at
ftp://othersideofthe.earth.li/pub/perl/
since it's a bit big to include here.)

The next stage, of course, is to produce a version of Configure in perl
so we can bootstrap the whole process without those nasty dependencies
on awk, sed, grep and stuff.

Anyway, I started the port of Configure today (Sorry, Sarathy, I know I
said I wouldn't do this yet, but work got boring :) and am about 10% of
the way through. However, I'm running into some interesting `issues'. 

As the patch stands, it sacrifices everything for portability.
`Everything' here currently includes things like opendir(), which is
nasty. (but not insurmountable) The reason is, I'm not sure what we can
sensibly assume - if anything - that a C library will give us. And if I
want opendir() should I bank on there being a dirent.h, or should we
implement it ourselves? In fact, how much of the C library are we
prepared to provide ourselves in order to get it up and working?

Oh, and general comments on the whole thing welcome.

-- 
"Everything's working, try again in half an hour."-chorus.net tech
support

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Follow-Ups from:

Andy Dougherty <doughera@lafayette.edu>
Nick Ing-Simmons <nik@tiuk.ti.com>

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