On Wednesday 12 January 2011, Xochitl Lunde wrote: > > > > > But let me rephrase the critique in a poignant way: if you want to > > > require GNU make anyway, what is your rational to not use quagmire > > > instead of Automake? > > > > > You mean this? > > <http://code.google.com/p/quagmire/> > > > > Well, the fact that it took me ~ 3 minutes to find it with Google is a > > good answer ... ;-) > > > > All kidding aside, is yours a serious question? If yes, I have a serious > > answer (well, several ones in fact), but I'd rather not take the time to > > write it down properly unless that's really useful. > > > > Your answer to why not to use quagmire is too long to make it a useful > answer? > > I went to this quagmire page you posted, and there is nothing in the > downloads tab. That would be a enough reason for me not to use quagmire. > I see that I can get the source, but I don't want to have to compile this > thing if it's not purely script based. Also when I go to > quagmire-discuss, there are a bunch of nasty topics that are over 1 month > old; nobody's moderating. > Sorry, there's a misunderstanding here (caused by me I'd say).
Those you list above are very good *practical* reasons not to use quagmire (and the very fact that it took me 3 minutes to find that page with google was IMHO already a clear indicator that the project is dead in practice). The "answer" I was speaking about would have been concerned with why I think that the quagmire *design* and *roadmap* are broken (even ignoring its "less than excellent" developement status). Okay, at this point I can as well write that answer out summarily: - I want something that is backward-compatible with automake 1.11 as much as possible (I mean 98/99% compatible), and that works from "day 0". Otherwise it won't stand any real chance of being used by real-worls projects. - I don't want to rewrite autoconf; with all its flaws, it rocks and is incredibly mature ans well-written. - I don't want to rewrite libtool in GNU make. The very idea of trying to do so scares the hell out of me. - I think that keeping configuration and build steps separated is a very good idea. Hope I managed to make myself clearer now. Regards, Stefano
