Configure: shining a light on a very dark and important corner of Perl (Updated)

Great blog post about the modern and ancient history of Configure.

Some highlights:

"Configure had 1279 lines of code in its original version. Today, in Perl 5 blead, it has nearly 25,000 lines of code."

"Over the years more than 130 individuals have contributed to Configure's evolution in more than 1300 individual commits."

"metaconfig is, in essence, a collection of programs written in Perl 4 which launch a series of probes into the hardware and software available on a given machine ..."

(updated with citations)

The way forward always starts with a minimal test.

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Re: Configure: shining a light on a very dark and important corner of Perl (Updated) by morgon (Priest) on Nov 04, 2017 at 01:56 UTC
I believe it was Bismarck who said that you don't really want to know two things: How sausages are made and how laws are made. I guess the third thing would be how perl gets compiled.	[reply]
Re^2: Configure: shining a light on a very dark and important corner of Perl by LanX (Saint) on Nov 04, 2017 at 04:00 UTC
> I believe it was Bismarck who said... Unfortunately, it was misattributed. See https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Godfrey_Saxe Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made. Cheers Rolf _{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language and ☆☆☆☆ :) Je suis Charlie!}	[reply]
Re^2: Configure: shining a light on a very dark and important corner of Perl (Updated) by Anonymous Monk on Nov 04, 2017 at 09:02 UTC
The wiser you get the more you realize all the everything is sausage	[reply]