5.1. What Is Portability?
Before we talk about the mechanics of deciding what to check for and how to check for it, let's ask ourselves a simple question: What is portability? Portability is a quality of the code that enables it to be built and run on a variety of platforms. In the Autoconf context, portability usually refers to the capability to run on Unix-like systems—sometimes including Windows.
When I first started using Autoconf, I had a hard time deciding what to check for in my 'configure.in'. At the time, I was maintaining a proprietary program that ran only on SunOS 4. However, I was interested in porting it to Solaris, OSF/1, and possibly Irix.
The approach I took, while workable, was relatively time-consuming and painful: I wrote ...
Get GNU Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
