Well, I find the info-pages that come with autoconf to be just on the spot. The best way to learn it though, is to have a small configure.in to start with and start modifying it (pick one up from a small project like GNU Hello). Create you Makefils.in's (again look in GNU Hello), and off you go.
As for writing portable code that work on other OS platforms than BSDs, I've found the Glib is an excellent tool for that. It's even Win32 enabled.
I'm also regretful that Apple went with BSD instead of going over and contributing to the Linux movement, but I can understand their reasoning.
If you're talking of licensing (i.e. BSD vs. GPL), they did not have a choice to go with GPL since they based their implementation upon Mach (which has the BSD licence). If you're talking of the layers above the microkernel, that's a whole different matter. They could indeed have based the rest of the system on Linux. How come they did not do this to more extent/some extent I can not tell. Being a major player in the development of MkLinux (Linux on top of the Mach microkernel) they did have experiences with it. I can only guess that they found the FreeBSD base more convenient to use. Oh what the heck, FreeBSD was based on 4.4BSD Lite which is also the base for Lites (the first OS which was built on top of Mach). As such, I would guessed that the Mach implementation is more geared towards supporting BSD than towards supporting Linux.
That said, I can't see the big gripe of going with BSD instead of Linux. What's the big deal here?
Well, it may sometimes be hard to figure out which code is portable and which is not (I'm not talking of obvious things like relying on/proc). I do however believe that we have a great tool that has helped loads of applications to be ported easily to BSD; glib.
I was a bit sceptic to glib at first, but after looking through their header files (actually just one file), I did realize that they provide most of the wrapper functions that you can ever think of.
(BTW, does anyone know how well glib works for Win32?)
Indeed. I've been using it since September. The only times is has chrashed on me was when I tried writing to a corrupted floppy. That problem seems to have magically disappeared now.
Also, things sometimes tend to get messed up (especially ps) after a make world (without compiling a new kernel). You can't really expect that to work properly though.
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As for writing portable code that work on other OS platforms than BSDs, I've found the Glib is an excellent tool for that. It's even Win32 enabled.
If you're talking of licensing (i.e. BSD vs. GPL), they did not have a choice to go with GPL since they based their implementation upon Mach (which has the BSD licence). If you're talking of the layers above the microkernel, that's a whole different matter. They could indeed have based the rest of the system on Linux. How come they did not do this to more extent/some extent I can not tell. Being a major player in the development of MkLinux (Linux on top of the Mach microkernel) they did have experiences with it. I can only guess that they found the FreeBSD base more convenient to use. Oh what the heck, FreeBSD was based on 4.4BSD Lite which is also the base for Lites (the first OS which was built on top of Mach). As such, I would guessed that the Mach implementation is more geared towards supporting BSD than towards supporting Linux.
That said, I can't see the big gripe of going with BSD instead of Linux. What's the big deal here?
I was a bit sceptic to glib at first, but after looking through their header files (actually just one file), I did realize that they provide most of the wrapper functions that you can ever think of.
(BTW, does anyone know how well glib works for Win32?)
Also, things sometimes tend to get messed up (especially ps) after a make world (without compiling a new kernel). You can't really expect that to work properly though.