On Fri, Jul 06, 2007 at 11:01:07AM +0200, Gerd Hoffmann wrote: > 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. Do not mistake the use of autoconf with automake. automake generates the unreadable Makefiles. You can quite easily create a useful Makefile yourself and use autoconf to select installation locations, detect features of older/newer libcs, etc. See http://oss.oracle.com/projects/makebo/ for an example of a build system that doesn't use automake, but allows for autoconf to do build-time configuration (an example user of makebo is ocfs2-tools, see http://oss.oracle.com/projects/ocfs2-tools/src/trunk/). And if you think that all packages should Just Work on all Linuxen, with out any build-time detection, try determining the differing udev layouts of FC6, FC7, Debian, Ubuntu, SuSE9, SuSE10, etc. Or where manpages go. The %configure of RPM specfiles and the dh_installman of debian packages handle this for you...often because they can use expected behavior of your build system. What about futexes? Older systems don't have them. Gotta detect that. Joel -- "I'm drifting and drifting Just like a ship out on the sea. Cause I ain't got nobody, baby, In this world to care for me." Joel Becker Principal Software Developer Oracle E-mail: joel.becker@xxxxxxxxxx Phone: (650) 506-8127 - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
