INTRO This version of dist has been written by Raphael Manfredi based on previous work from Larry Wall and Harlan Stenn. HISTORY I started working on this in September 1990 while I was still a student at the Ecole des Mines de Saint-Etienne, France. From then on, I worked during two years at ISE (building the Eiffel 3.0 compiler -- the run-time part and code generation). Since I chose to use metaconfig for the run-time library, which is written in plain C, I had the chance to continue improving the whole dist package. By the end of 1991, I contacted Harlan Stenn who had been working separately on his own dist version. I started the painful merge. At the same time, I started releasing alpha version of dist 3.0. In 1992, I started a parallel project: mailagent. The dist 2.0 release upon which this work is based included a simple perl script called mailagent, whose sole job was to filter out @SH commands to automatically mail patches to some people. I liked the idea of having a perl mail filter and so I extended mailagent up to the point where it became really big and only marginally dist-related. I released it on the net (comp.sources.misc) on July 1992, after 7 months of hard work. In March 1993, I left ISE and returned to France to join ACRI. The dist 3.0 package was "almost" finished by that time, but the documentation was no longer accurate and needed a lot of work. My new job does not give me enough free time, so things have been longer than I expected. In July 1993, under the pressure of many of my alpha testers, I decided to go into the final process, sacrifying nights and week ends to finish up what turns out to have been a 3 years process... CREDITS My first thanks will go to Larry Wall who wrote perl and dist 2.0 in the first place. I would never have dived into dist 2.0 if it had not been written in perl. During my work, I had the chance to benefit some useful comments and contributions from Craig Kolb who has been the very first user of metaconfig (with a rather pre-historic version). He used it on its rayshade 4.0 release (a ray tracing program). Then of course, many thanks are due to my co-worker, Harlan Stenn . Although I did the integration of his work all by myself, I have found many good ideas in his early work. For instance, he wrote the first implementation of the metalint program, something I could not live without today! His remarks, comments and encouragements have always been appreciated, even though we did not always agree on the same things at the same time... Then I would like to thank the many contributors to the metaconfig units. I hope I'm not forgetting anybody! Here they come, in alphabetical order: (sorted on the first name) Andy Dougherty Craig Kolb Graham Stoney Harlan Stenn Jan Djarv Larry Wall Ralf E. Stranzenbach Scott Grosch Syd Weinstein Thomas Neumann Wayne Davison If I forgot your name, please let me know, and accept my apologies (not necessarily in that order ;-). Finally, thank you Shigeya Suzuki for hosting the dist-users mailing list. Send mail to majordomo@foretune.co.jp to subscribe. Raphael Manfredi Lyon, France, August 1993 [This section added by subsequent patches] PATCHES I'm grateful to the following people for sending me patches and/or reporting bugs and giving me some suggestions (sorted on the first name): Andy Dougherty Graham Stoney Ilya Zakharevich Jarkko Hietaniemi Joseph H Buehler Keith Walker Scott Presnell Wayne Davison Due to a mistake of mine, changes from Wayne Davison were flagged 'WAD', but his middle initial being an 'E', new ones are now flagged as 'WED'. Sorry Wayne, I did not know. We don't use middle initials here in Europe. Special thanks to the perl5 Patch Pumpkin Holders (in chronological order): Andy Dougherty Chip Salzenberg for their wonderful creativity. Perl5 is by far the largest metaconfig customer with the widest audience, so Configure got run on a variety of new platforms requiring specific fixes... which they provided, thereby greatly enhancing the metaconfig "portability database". Raphael Manfredi Grenoble, France, February 1997