On Tue, 22 Nov 2011, Stefano Lattarini wrote:
there may be some benefit to package maintainers (hopefully by
making automake easier to use),
My hope is to manage, in the *long* run (real long), to turn automake
(or more precisely, its purpoted GNU-make-based successor, let's call
it "automire") into something *truly* extensible -- I mean, something
like autoconf-extensible. This would be a huge win for the package
maintainers.
In order for this to work, Automake would need to become self-hosting
(not need other packages to be installed in advance) and written only
in a GNU-approved and FSF-copyrighted portable implementation
language. Currently Automake is written in perl, which is not a
GNU-approved or FSF-copyrighted language and is also something which
would need to be installed in advance. If Automake was self-hosting
then there would be no need for distributing pre-generated template
files since Automake could generate everything it needs at run-time.
It would be quite useful for a FSF project to be spun-up to create an
embeddable/small language interpreter and standard library which is
capable of efficiently implementing complex make-like functionality
('automake') as well as providing functional replacements for any
necessary string processing currently provided by 'sed', 'awk', and
'printf'. The sole function of the interpreter would be to provide
the framework for building other software. This intepreter could form
the basis for the new automake build tool.
Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
bfrie...@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
