On 2018-01-31 12:21, Erik Bray wrote:
I'm not going to say I didn't expect pushback from you on this, but I feel like this is not a real argument.
I assure you that it was meant as a serious argument. I'm not complaining for the sake of complaining.
In fact, the old code was still essentially doing the same thing, but in the form of some ugly shell code buried in a configure.ac and not even in the makefile itself.
That's not "essentially the same thing" at all.
An apt analogy would be a web server generating HTML by printf statements versus using a template format intended for HTML.
That web server would still serve plain HTML in the end, so the analogy doesn't work. I have nothing against templates or auto-generating stuff. What I dislike with the Makefile is that the templates are in the end product instead of in an intermediate step.
Now, I thought that the comments I included in the file made it reasonably clear what was going on
I didn't even look at the file. I'm just complaining against the principle.
Your only point about debugging is extremely hypothetical--exactly what kind of "obscure bug in the build system" do you anticipate being obscured by this?
Typically, some dependency tracking bug. As in "why is it rebuilding this" or "why is it not building this"?
In summary, I think it's strange to complain about this with autoconf itself is little more than a massive pile of text macros and is *much* harder to understand and to debug than this.
Again: with "autoconf" you *can* look at the generated "./configure" file. And I actually do that sometimes and I also edit that file sometimes to debug stuff.
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