Yes, I know about the NAVAIDs, but they identify at 5 WPM and the airman's charts print the dots and dashes next to the waypoint. And there might still be runway aids that say a few letters, also at 5 WPM, but it's always the same letters for left and right and the outer, middle, and inner marker. Pilots learn the sounds for each.

When I was a Technician licensee, all of the repeaters were populated mostly by Technician licensees, and identified much faster than any of them could copy. So it was clear the Morse tone (erroneously called a "CW" ID because it wasn't Constant Wave) was there for a legal requirement only. But most of the repeaters could identify in phone, too. Back in NY, we had WR2ACD identify with the voice of the famous CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite, who was of course KB2GSD.

Actually it has QWERTY :-)

I remember in about 1979 having a conversation with someone who was convinced of the superiority of EBCDIC, and really disappointed that ASCII had become the standard. I think he died a long time ago. I wonder what he would have thought of Unicode?

I drive an automobile. It has an internal-combustion engine.

My computer keyboard has QUERTY.

I think there's a century behind both of those things, isn't there?

I am told that Bill Cross, the FCC staffer then in charge of Amateur Radio, had this displayed on his office wall. It was, of course, very different from the usual FCC comment. I was trying to make a point of how antique Morse was.

The Novice license stopped being the path to entry once the no-code Technician licensing started. There was indeed an ITU requirement, but it was at the behest of IARU, not as the requirement of any government. Similarly, FCC actually raised code speed requirements at the behest of ARRL. Shore stations had moved to phone and teletype decades before. Most ships no longer employed radio operators, but left that duty to other staff who only used phone. There was only a token continuing monitoring of Morse ship transmissions, now entirely gone.

There was one pro-code guy who pleaded with me to allow Amateur Radio to "die with dignity". If nothing else did, that convinced me that the pro-code folks could see the end coming and would accept it as long as it came after they died. Amateur licensing was declining fast, operators were dying faster than new ones got licenses, and we could see the end of Amateur Radio would come in a few decades at most..

Now there are more hams than ever, and Amateur Radio is healthy. When I say "We won", it means "Amateur Radio won". It's too bad we had to fight our own old guys.

There isn't really any reason for government agencies and NGOs to use Amateur Radio. They have satellite phones, etc. But if it really bothers you, why not lobby against allowing compensation for operators? I'd join that bandwagon.

The Pixar code base came from Lucasfilm, and went back to the 1970's. Some of that code is still in use.

I lobbied to end the requirement for an examination of the ability to decode Morse code with your ear and brain. Until 2007, the U.S. Federal Government required it before they would license all but the lowest grade of Amateur Radio hobbyists.

As part of my lobbying effort, I successfully passed a test for receiving code at 20 words per minute, and then subsequently refused to use the code on the air. 20 WPM is so fast that you have to decode by the sound of each character, you don't have enough time to pick out the individual dots and dashes.

We won.

The sound triangulated was in cryogenic liquid oxygen at 50 PSI. The speed of sound in that is approximately 1 kilometer per second.This paper is about calculating the exact speed. Elon talked in the conference about reading telemetry with millisecond accuracy. But this would yield only 1 meter resolution.

That's not the way it works. When cross-compiling, configure runs on the host. It tests that things compile. It doesn't test that they run.

Roger,

This is great. It does look like a 1:1 mapping to what we expect autoconf to do, except neater and maintainable.

The only problem with selling this to GNU folks is that it would make CMake a prerequisite to everything. But I think it's worth it. And then there's inertia. And the language isn't as pretty as we'd like.

Can you see any other possible objections?

Thanks

Bruce

Cmake are scons require that they already be installed.

This is assuming that a shell capable of running ./configure is available on all of your platforms.

I should correct that: automake builds things by creating makefiles. The configure script created by autoconf is concerned with configuration rather than building, but its output is input to automake.

CMake, Scons, etc. are mainly targeted at dependency-based building of programs. Autotools doesn't really build anything. It goes through a long list of system facilities, determining if each is present. For many, perhaps most of them, it builds a little C program that exercises the facility, and sees if it compiles.

Now, there's another poster who says you really can do this with CMake, which I'll have to look at.

This isn't really a problem for StackOverflow. It's a problem for the developers of GCC and its libraries, and a policy problem for the overall GNU project in that Autotools is IMO too much of a mess to live, and is a barrier to participation as it stands. That's why I talk about it here instead of just submitting it as a bug report.

I would like to see someone come up with an alternative. That alternative is not CMake or Scons, etc., because those are build systems rather than systems that probe a platform for fine differences in the programming environment and produce a set of macro switches as output.