Now that we're integrating in with perl 5, a few things are becoming
really obvious.

First, we really need to work on the embedding interface. Memory
handling, signals, and I/O are the biggies there. Working on that,
though not fast enough for Arthur.

Second, we're running over the same problems in system configuration
that perl (and python, and ruby, for that matter) have already run
across. Moreover, we're making the same decisions, only...
differently. This is silly both because we're re-inventing the wheel
and we're making the wheel with metric nuts instead of english.

We could go dig through perl's configure every time we add a new
environment probe, but that'll get really old really quick. Instead,
what I'd like is for someone (Oh, Brent... :) to go through perl's
configure and dig out the tests in it, as well as the defaults that
it has and just get all the config variables in once and for all.
While some of what's in there we don't have to deal with (joys of C89
as a minimum requirement) there's a lot of hard-won platform
knowledge in there and ignoring it's foolish.
--
                                         Dan

--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski                          even samurai
d...@sidhe.org                         have teddy bears and even
                                       teddy bears get drunk