On Fri, 10 Sep 2004 09:00:25 -0400, Aaron Sherman wrote (in part):
ajs> All of this depends on if Dan was saying "No autoconf RELIANCE,
ajs> dammit" or actually "No autoconf, dammit". The first is a reasonable
ajs> stance to take given the portability concerns. The second throws away
ajs> useful information.
>From the perspective of someone who has long experience with autoconf, the
second does NOT throw away useful information. It's autoconf itself which
does that. [Yes, I do understand what you really meant, but this has
finally exceeded my "keep quiet" threshold.]
Putting it another way, autoconf has a long history of breaking on
less-favoured platforms. When it breaks, it's damnably hard for even an
otherwise-knowledgeable (but not autoconf/automake-savvy) end-user to fix
the results, or even to give any useful feedback to the development team
as to what went wrong. The problem is that, unlike metaconfig, autoconf
simply drops things from its generated config.status and config.h files.
[The relevant contrast with metaconfig is that it leaves explicit
commented-out #undef's of what could have been included, so that you can
repair its faulty findings if it gets them wrong.]
Thus, to this well-scarred developer, "No Autoconf, dammit!" means this:
"Use something that actually WORKS -- which autoconf does NOT!". It's not
just a problem when autoconf truly fails. In fact, that's a lot easier to
handle. The major pain comes when it thinks it worked, but it got things
wrong.
A recent case in point went as follows. Autoconf 'said', "You have no
usable pthreads interfaces, and no _r reentrant routines." What that
really meant was this: "I tried #include'ing <pthread.h> and didn't know
that I need -D_REENTRANT on your platform for that to work, so I couldn't
get my test programmes to compile because my probing is faulty."
Sure, I know enough to have been able to fix it. See above about
"otherwise-knowledgeable". It should not require a descent into the Black
Arts to get configuration probing to tell you what it couldn't figure out.
That is the source of my own opposition to the use of autoconf. I suspect
that similar experiences are also at least part of Dan's, but I don't
*know* that.
--s.
