Sidebar re autoconf

[Andrew Tridgell]

> | this is another case indicating the need for autoconf.  anyone want to
> | convert samba to use GNU autoconf?
> 
>   I mildly recommend against it, as it's like the girl with the curl:
> When she's good, she's very very good, but when she's bad, she's horrid.

yeah, I know what you mean. autoconf can be terrible if done wrong.

I do intend us to use autoconf, but I also want us to get it
right. There are heaps of little things that we do in a horible kludgy
way at the moment because we have no compile time configuration
detection. Often we end up doing runtime detection of things that
should be done at compile time. We also tend to err on the
conservative side in the Makefile and includes.h with what capabilities
(shared memory, mmap etc) are available on the machine. With autoconf
we can test for these are enable them on all boxes that can handle them.

Cheers, Andrew