First of all I have to mention that taking all difficulty of maintaining
autotools scripts we release users from having to handcraft Imake config and
read manuals about how to build that application. Any user just want to
configure && make install. And I like it too.
Second configure scans your system for dependencies and gives you options. It
will not start building if some dep lib is absent. So user would get a clear
message what he needs to install instead of gcc error about some libxxx not
found or unresolved symbols.
Third Automake gives VPATH. This is absolutely must have. Automake gives many
standard targets.
Do you have something against libtool?
In general it gives portability and simplicity for USER. It's not always simple
for developer of course. But from my point of view auto* are not so weird. All
you need is to know is M4 which looks elegant for me.
If you will look into the crafted configure.ac you'll find a separate section
for OpenBSD. In this section you can add custom tests and set config variables
the same as in OpenBSD.cf. So don't worry man.
If you'll have any questions please ask. And please if you insist not to use
autotools give your arguments. What alternatives? I don't know other build
tools that can be compared with auto*. And you know Motif was switched on
autotools. Before it was on Imake. Actually it used almost the same config and
rule files in config/cf. But they changed and it was a step forward. SO what's
special about CDE?
Alex
________________________________
From: Pascal Stumpf <pascal.stu...@cubes.de>
To: Oleksiy Ch <och...@rocketmail.com>
Cc: "cdesktopenv-devel@lists.sourceforge.net"
<cdesktopenv-devel@lists.sourceforge.net>
Sent: Sunday, February 3, 2013 10:08 PM
Subject: Re: [cdesktopenv-devel] porting on Autotools initiative
On Sun, 3 Feb 2013 11:43:32 -0800 (PST), Oleksiy Ch wrote:
> HI,
>
> I examined CDE it contains ancient Imakefiles. I think it must be ported on
> Autotools as Motif did, but in a more wise way. I made some work in this way.
> Currently I have lib dir ported on autotools completely. Actually the main
> thing is configure.ac, it's 95% of code. It absorbed much from config/cf/*.
> So with configure.ac the core part of porting is done. Current configure.ac
> makes checks but don't abort on check fail. It's temporary.
As someone having to deal with auto* on a daily basis in OpenBSD ports,
please, please, please, please no. It is a major pain to work with and
continues to waste hundreds of hours of developer time fighting with its
quirks and stupidities. Imakefiles may not be the nicest or most modern
build system around, but they get the job done and do so in a much more
transparent manner than the monstrosity that is GNU auto*.
So, please point out your reasoning *why* you think replacing Imakefiles
is a necessity and why that replacement should be Autotools.
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