On 10/01/11 15:09, Nadav Har'El wrote:
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".
I tried, twice, in the past to poke people who were recommending CMake
on these points. To date, I have not managed to receive any satisfactory
answers.
The way I see it, from the somewhat limited research I've done:
autoconf: More or less like Nadav put it. A vital tool (with it's should
be mandatory friend, autoheader, of course) for cross-platform posix
code. Need to use O_NOFOLLOW, but only some platforms have it? Write a
tiny test, define O_NOFOLLOW to zero if the test fails, and you're done.
No need to check anything in the source code. No #ifdefs. Also, many
people who do not like autoconf have simply never heard of autoscan.
Automake: I actually use it, and quite like it. It gives a strange but
useful balance between the straitjacket that is any makefile generator
and does leave some space for actual customization, if you care enough
to learn the idiosyncrasies. I do not use it for all my projects, and
even when I do use it, I do not always use it for ALL of the project
(check out fakeroot-ng for a project that uses automake for some, but
not all, of the build process), but where I do use it, I find it does a
decent job of it. The main advantage, as far as I'm concerned, is that
all it requires from the destination platform is a functioning bourne shell.
m4/aclocal - I use it as part of the autoconf generation, but have never
bothered to learn it properly.
libtool - there's a loaded subject. Yes, I usually use it, but no, I
don't think it's a great tool. It has horrible bugs where
cross-compiling is concerned (by which point it's not your project that
has those bugs, which makes it all the more difficult to solve). It does
take some headache away from you, and so I do use it occasionally, but I
am not a great fan. If there was an easy way to generate shared
libraries with automake without libtool, I would.
Then again, about the competition:
CMake - as far as I could dig up, it is even more restrictive than
automake, require CMake itself to be ported and installed on the
compiling platform, and its greatest touted advantage, that it is much
simpler to learn than auto*, is irrelevant to me as I already know auto*.
In general, I feel much more at home with systems that boil down to a
makefile of one sort of another. So, automake, kbuild, and even the
horrific thing the Android system uses are better, in my eyes, than
something that seeks to reinvent the core build system. Then again,
there are one or two things I wish gmake could do (such as path
adjusting includes), which would cause me to say I don't need even
those, and make do with just autoconf.
Shachar
--
Shachar Shemesh
Lingnu Open Source Consulting Ltd.
http://www.lingnu.com
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