Hi,
On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 10:35:55AM +0200, Bernd Jendrissek wrote:
> It's just that my sense of aesthetics is offended by the existence of
> a *thousand* such collections of a "few lines" of shell in a
> customised ./{autogen,bootstrap}.sh amongst all the autoconfiscated
> packages out there. And those "few lines" invariably grow until one
> can't trivially grasp their correctness with one glance. They're all
> asymptotically growing towards autoreconf-like intelligence anyway!
I cannot second that.
autoreconf is really an equivalent of a five line script.
It just has an intelligence to grep the sources to find out which of
the core tools are used and which are not, and to call only the
relevant ones. Since the maintainer shall know this bitmap they
shell be able to comment out the right lines out of the standard five
or seven lines long "maximal" bootstrap.
The "grow beyond grasp" is caused by adding extra functions, starting
with new autotools like projects (intltool, glib-gettext, ...) and
ending with finding/downloading extra repositories (gnulib, The
Translation Project).
Call it evolution or democracy, people just use new technology.
We need an extensible framwork ("open", you may say), which allows
that wothout the blessing from the Autoconf developers.[1]
And, getting back to my point, this extending would not be easier if
the autoreconf script had some kind of "plugins".
I still think that the maintainer of each project should be able to
cook his own version of "libtoolize;autopoint;aclocal -I m4;
autoconf; autheader; automake", and it does not help much of we
provide a 696 lines long perl script which tries to do this work.
Likewise, it wouldn't simplify the matters if we has megabytes of
autoreconf plugin code, which would autmatically add all the tricks
observed in all bootstrap scripts in the universe.
Yet another answer:
> [...] And those "few lines" invariably grow until one
> can't trivially grasp their correctness with one glance. They're all
> asymptotically growing towards autoreconf-like intelligence anyway!
Perhaps you cannot grasp the bootstrap script with a glance because
it is poorly written.
Each program, no matter whether it is written in C, shall, ml, or
whatever, shal consist of functions which fit into one screen each.
Otherwise it is hard to understand.
Stepan Kasal
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