On Mon, Jan 10, 2011 at 03:09:03PM +0200, Nadav Har'El wrote: > On Mon, Jan 10, 2011, Shlomi Fish wrote about "Re: Die GNU autotools": > > On Monday 10 Jan 2011 12:49:25 Ilya A. Volynets-Evenbakh wrote: > > > My feelings too. A while ago I got so tired of autotools that I even > > > started working on my own build system intended as a semi-drop-in > > > replacement. It's purely make-based. If interested, take a look at > > > the sources http://sources.total-knowledge.com/gitweb/?p=adon-banai.git > > > > > > > Well, after a small experimentation with SCons ( http://www.scons.org/ ) > > which > > I didn't really like (but is still better than GNU Autohell), I've finally > > settled on CMake - http://www.cmake.org/ - which is awesome in almost every > > It saddens me that people bundle Autoconf and Automake under one name > "autotools", because it causes people to miss that Autoconf *is* the best > thing since sliced bread, while the rest of them are, well, not.
It's not just autoconf and automake. It's also libtool and pkg-config. And some other minor components. [snip] > Fast forward 20 years, and autoconf is just as good as it used to be, but > most people are starting to forget why it was needed, and only remember its > quirkiness, like the fact it uses the bizarre "m4" as its base. > One reason why people forget how good autoconf is, is that they hardly see > different variants of Unix, and the differences between Linux distributions > are typically smaller. Enter Debian. Install Debian GNU/kFreeBSD (i386 or amd64) on a virtual machine or a space PC, and get your favorite program to build and run. Note: it's a FreeBSD kernel, but it's GLIBC. http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/ This is why Debian proudly calls itself GNU :-) (This is another reason why I keep a MIPS netbook: to force myself thinking portable) > Another reason for forgetting autoconf's greatness is > that "normal" people don't compile any more! Most Linux users get precompiled > binaries from their distributions, and it is the distribution's packagers > which do the compilation. Many others "build". They run some sort of build system which eventually calls './configure; make; make install' or something similar. But in a completely transparent manner. > Finally, these packagers (who do the compilation) > don't really care if the source code used autoconf, or a hand-tweaked > Makefile, > because they anyway *patch* the source code with all sort of distribution- > specific modifications, so they could care less about *patching* the Makefile. > This state of affairs is, in my opinion, sad. Packagers do care. Packagers hate hand-crafted makefiles. > > Once you forget why autoconf is important, it's easy to start believing that > all sorts of unrelated tools could somehow replace it. Things like Cmake > and Adon-Banai can hardly be considered replacements to Autoconf - perhaps > they are better "make", perhaps they are "imake done again", but not > "better than autoconf". > (note: since I never actually used Cmake or Adon-Banai, I may be missing > something, so feel free to correct me). I have never used Adon Banai. I have an educated guess that it is missing many, many features in more mature build systems. CMake has some issues of its own, from what I know, but at least it is more mature. -- Tzafrir Cohen | tzaf...@jabber.org | VIM is http://tzafrir.org.il | | a Mutt's tzaf...@cohens.org.il | | best tzaf...@debian.org | | friend _______________________________________________ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
