..
>In particular, while my product is currently Unix only, the build
>process
>must work under Windows too, which rules out make, autoconf, and other
>such silliness. :-)

I gather this rules out using a compiler too ... ;-)
In particular, when you say "must work under windows", do you mean out
of the box window, or one with some tools installed (ocaml, python,
cygwin thus bash, make ...)

>	pcre cannot build without config.h, and neither can mlgtk.
>So there is a conflict, since both require a file called 'config.h'.

I have many "config.h" in many source distributions in my /usr/src
directory. I have never had such a problem. Actually, most of the
time, to build an application you don't need to build the
library. You actually require that it is there (and the nice thing is
you can make your ./configure check for it). Librairies and include
files are installed in some canonical places which can be looked up,
or non-canonical which can be explicitely given to the installation
script.

>> >       PLEASE use filenames that are specialised to your package,
>> >       do NOT use generic names on the assumption your code will
>> >       be built with your Makefile in a separate directory.
>> 
>> This is impossible. 
>
>	It is not impossible to try.

True, but since there is a nice mechanism to deal with this (ie
Makefile and directories), is this really worth it ?
Do you think we should adopt the java convention for naming ? This
would be a pain ...

Alan Schmitt
--
The hacker: someone who figured things out and made something cool happen.