On Mon, Jan 10, 2011 at 9:56 PM, Tzafrir Cohen <tzaf...@cohens.org.il>wrote:
> [snipped] > Yeah. You have your own hand-crafted Makefiles. With the only > special-case of Darwin. No need to be portable. > All your issues are valid from purity POV. Indeed in some rare cases compiling C files with g++, when cross compiling from Mac OS X to other platform (wow, when would that happen?), you'll have to edit a single, easy to understand line in the top of the makefile, and make distclean doesn't make sense really, it should be dropped altogether (care to issue a bug report?). But then again, this software is usable today on many platforms, and it makes life easier maintainance-wise for 99.9% of the use cases, and using it in a special way is possible without too much hassle. Let's compare the situation there with the situation of VLC which uses autotools. I had once the doubted pleasure of cross-compiling version 0.86 of VLC to windows on Linux (as recommended by the docs) with a modern distribution software today. As expected this beast didn't compile even though I had the very same version of gcc and the exact binary libraries required by 0.86. What happened is that for some reason (maybe the autotools version wasn't 100% the same of the autotools version they originally used to build 0.86, or I don't know what) the autogenerated libtool script was broken, reading it and editing the m4 file which generated it was a very difficult job. So I ended up reimplementing libtool with python. So yes, you'll have errors even with autotools, but I'd rather debug the errors of a hand written readable Makefile than the errors of autotools script. (BTW m4 and bash are indeed Turing complete, but they make great job obfuscating your Turing machine ;-)
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