How hard would it be to BORG the fixproto stuff?

[Bruce Korb <bkorb at veritas dot com>]

Hi Zack,

I think it might be interesting and useful to have a single
installable program that did all the header cleanup stuff.
To do that, the simplest approach is to just stuff all the
scripts into massive strings and feed them to a system(3) call.
After our Cygnus binary installer friend asked for changes to
the fixincl.sh script, I realized that doing such with
that script might work.  I might use ``popen( script, "r" )''
for the first part, then system(3) for the cleanup, but
that's the idea.  It would even fix the glitch caused by
cron closing stdin instead of redirecting to /dev/null.
But I should do that anyways, before I could do this.

As far as reformatting the text goes, it is now quite
simple, since we are going to version 5 of AutoGen.
You can now do this:

  script = << END_OF_SCRIPT
  ...whatever-you-want, even with unbalanced quotes
  END_OF_SCRIPT;

then the script gets stuffed into the program in k&r format.

Benefits:
1.  after an OS upgrade or any other upgrade that changes
    system headers, you do not have to re-install GCC.
    Just rerun fixinc.

2.  It becomes easier for anyone to test their headers
    to see if they have run afoul of standard breakages.

3.  The binary installation methods have got to become easier.

So, waste of time or not?  I could probably finish before
the end of 2002  :-).