autoconf and epel-5

[Kevin Kofler]

Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> Correct - I didn't mean to offend Tom, but it's obvious, that some
> people around in this thread don't understand the autotools.

In case "some people around in this thread" is supposed to include me:
Oh, I do understand the autotools fairly well, well enough to realize their
design is completely broken: they litter "source" tarballs with generated
files, they think all the world is Unix (everything relies on shell
scripts), they use one of the world's most balkanized programming languages
(Bourne shell) and thus end up with tons of workarounds for some obscure
Unix's shell's bugs or bizarre dialect, they encourage testing for
availability of constructs from a 20-year-old programming language standard
(ANSI C89 / ISO C90) when the results of those tests usually get thrown
away because almost all upstream projects rightfully don't care about
pre-C89/C90 environments (those few projects which do still care about
ancient non-standard compilers/libraries should carry the burden of
explicitly adding these checks, having checks for memcpy and the like added
to every single project by default doesn't make sense), you have to learn
at least 4 different arcane syntaxes to fully use the autotools (m4, shell,
make and automake's magic variables) etc.

Why can't projects just switch to CMake?

        Kevin Kofler