Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
Jeff Garzik wrote:
Christoph Hellwig wrote:
And this is really dumb. autotools is a completely pain in the ass and
not useful at all for linux-only tools.
A myth. It is quite useful for packagers, because of the high Just
Works(tm) factor. After porting an entire across several revisions of a
distro, the autotools-based packages are the ones that work out of the
box 90% of the time.
And the 10% where it doesn't work it is a real pain to figure what goes
wrong due to the completely unreadable Makefiles generated by autotools.
After all they are not Makefiles, they are shellscripts embedded into
Makefiles.
The other 90% of _my_ time comes from annoying people who roll their own
Makefile/build solution, which the packager has to then learn.
Well, it's not *that* hard to write makefiles which follow the usual
gnuish conventions, so stuff like "make DESTDIR=/tmp/buildroot install"
works just fine. That isn't a reason to use autotools. Especially as
people get that wrong *even with* autotools from time to time ...
It's not _just_ makefiles, though. Packaging systems know what to do
with configure scripts, and automatically plug that into their systems,
e.g. with rpm's %configure, %make_install, etc.
Having ported an entire distro, the time savings with autotools [OR
ANOTHER STANDARD BUILD/CONFIGURE SYSTEM] are very real. Similarly, the
time sink with each project doing its own home-rolled build/configure
system is also very real.
Jeff
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