Joel Becker wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 06, 2007 at 11:01:07AM +0200, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
>> And the 10% where it doesn't work it is a real pain to figure what goes
>> wrong due to the completely unreadable Makefiles generated by autotools.
>> After all they are not Makefiles, they are shellscripts embedded into
>> Makefiles.
>
> Do not mistake the use of autoconf with automake. automake
> generates the unreadable Makefiles. You can quite easily create a
> useful Makefile yourself and use autoconf to select installation
> locations, detect features of older/newer libcs, etc.
Sure. I have some projects using autoconf only. 90% of the projects
use both though, autoconf-only is quite rare these days (used to be
different because autoconf was the first ...).
> And if you think that all packages should Just Work on all
> Linuxen, with out any build-time detection, try determining the
> differing udev layouts of FC6, FC7, Debian, Ubuntu, SuSE9, SuSE10, etc.
s/build/run/ time check IMHO. Otherwise things blow up if the user
upgrades fc6 to 7 ...
> Or where manpages go.
/usr/share/man everythere, since years. Maybe except Debian because
they first discuss 5 years how to handle that ;)
> What about
> futexes? Older systems don't have them. Gotta detect that.
Sure, there are some things left you might want to check for even for
linux-only projects. If it is only whenever some library is installed.
autoconf will do that, sure. It's still quite some overkill in many
cases IMHO. On smaller projects the configure script can easily take
more than 80% of the tarball size ...
cheers,
Gerd
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