On Mon, May 29, 2017 at 01:58:41PM +0000, ra...@openmailbox.org wrote: > one of the most widely reported sources of suck are the autotools that gives > you the (in)ability to compile programs from source. ./configure, automake, > autoconf, autoreconf, m4, intltool, libtoolize, etc. > > the best practice used in suckless projects is generally to have a main > makefile that imports a config.mk that allows for customization. Still > people created tools like scons, cmake, waf, boost build, raft, rebar, rake > and more. I have often heard it reported that working with these is worse > than simply using makefiles, it certainly requires extra dependencies. > > The reason people want these build systems despite the suckless approach > working so well is they want config.mk to be filled in automatically (based > on which libraries are available on the system and similar). > > Here's how a suckless configure tool could subsume all the GNU autotools > stuff in a fraction of the code without giving any control over build > configuration up: > > There would be a single tool 'slconfigure' which is able to parse a standard > format for config.mk files. It will parse these in to know what can be > configured then it will process the command lines args to allow > customization, it can automatically detect which libraries are needed based > on the options inside config.mk and then it will overwrite the config.mk > file. > > So to build a project you go slconfigure ; make ; make install. If you > wanted to edit the config.mk file manually (like we have been doing) you > would simply not invoke (maybe not even install slconfigure) just run make. > > All the old GNU software could be patched to use this new build system > format and the autoreconf stuff deleted. >
Hey, If dynamic configure options are really needed just name the script "configure". Often it is not needed and an example Makefile can be copied to your project and modified a little. Also the use of #ifdefs should be considered carefully. -- Kind regards, Hiltjo
