On Mon, Apr 1, 2013 at 11:35 PM, Florin Iucha <florin at iucha.net> wrote: > On Mon, Apr 01, 2013 at 01:37:57PM -0500, Joel Longanecker wrote: > > Now, autoconf and libtool are abominations that should have been > slowly reduced in scope over time, as the other Unices died off, and > we are left only with GNU/Linux, BSDs and to some extent Solaris and > AIX. All of them support POSIX and SUSv3, all of them have C99 > compilers - the proprietary compilers are implementing gcc > compatibility layers (see icc and suncc). There is no need for that > madness anymore. Use pkgconfig to query what libraries are available, > ask the user to select the options by editing a simple text file > instead of passing a bajilion '--enable-foo', '--with-more-bar' on the > configure command line. > Having debugged libtool scripts in the depths of some gnarly builds I definitely agree libtool is an abomination! On the flip side, having had to maintain over a few hundred libraries and tools across multiple flavors of unix and Linux I came to appreciate consistency. Autotools had its flaws, but it was nice for the builds to share conventions. As other build systems came into play it became inconvenient as a maintainer to have to figure out how each one did its magic and how to get it to do something beyond defaults (send in specific paths, install locations, etc...). But the maintainers aren't the only users - there's something to be said for ease of configuration. Autotools isn't awful but I'm sure there's something cleaner. Even so, I remember what a breath of fresh air it was when X11 moved from xmkmf to autoconf - I sure don't miss IMAKEFILEs. > > > Now I can make more complicated build scripts, including shell calls to > > dpkg for dependency management. (You can also do this in make, but it is > > absolutely horrible to try and do so.) > > Have you tried scons? > I'd forgotten about that one. -Rob -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20130402/b0f046a3/attachment.html>