Platform Development • Re: Autoconf dependency removal?

We actually already vendored autoconf, so this isn't really an issue anymore. No one has to have it installed on their system now. That old autoconf version is really just a series of GNU m4 scripts, nothing that scary for anyone with Unix experience...

That said, it would be kind of difficult to remove the last pieces of autoconf without getting rid of GNU make, and Mozilla actually didn't get rid of autoconf completely until fairly recently. Took them years and I think they had to use something called ninja we have no experience with to complete the transition...

Also, last time it was discussed, I don't think most of us were big fans of moz.configure, or making more stuff dependent on it... if we were to ditch autoconf, it would probably be for something different than what Mozilla came up with. Like on Windows, I'm actually pretty sure we could replace most of what autoconf and make do with MSBuild and Visual Studio tools, and it would probably work better. Though unfortunately that approach wouldn't be cross-platform.