autoconf and epel-5

Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler at chello.at
Thu Feb 26 09:34:50 UTC 2009


Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> Your postings speak a different language. 90% of your postings are
> demonstrations of your lack of understanding them and mere propaganda
> aiming at promoting cmake.

I've had to work a lot with the autotools, which gave me a thorough
understanding of how badly designed they are.

For example, I've seen a lot of projects using some stock autotools template
which tests for a lot of stuff (including standard functions such as
memcpy), then not actually using the results of those tests. Now maybe
those projects' maintainers do not understand the autotools, but that just
proves my point that they are too hard to use.

I also had a lot of problems with incompatibility between versions. "Just
ship the file generated with the version you use and backwards
incompatibility won't matter" is not a solution: it doesn't help the
maintainer when he/she upgrades his/her system and it doesn't help you when
you need to modify something in the .ac/.am files (the actual source code -
often a one-line change there corresponds to a lot of changes in the
generated files, so it's hard to do those changes in the generated files by
hand - been there, done that) (and modifying is kinda the point of Free
Software!).

Trust me, I have my reasons to hate the autotools! I'm not disparaging the
autotools to promote a particular alternative, it's the opposite: the main
reason I'm promoting that particular alternative is that it's the one which
has the best chances to displace the broken autotools. And if everyone uses
their own custom solutions, that's going to make things really messy to
package, that's why I'm promoting only one solution. I'm not paid by
Kitware to promote their project or anything like that. ;-)

        Kevin Kofler




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