On Wed, Feb 07, 2007 at 01:46:06PM -0600, Aaron Griffin wrote:
On 2/7/07, Jürgen Hötzel <juergen@hoetzel.info> wrote:
On Wed, Feb 07, 2007 at 01:09:46PM -0500, Aaron Griffin wrote:
+* feature for 3.1: revamp the autotools system. I'd LOVE to use a manual system + like wmii and friends do. It'd be real nice if we could just do away with + autotools altogether.
Whats the problem with autotools/libtools?
Technically, nothing. It's more personal preference than anything else. I like manual methods. make is a great system and really doesn't need layer upon layer to work. There are many very large projects out there which don't need autotools and get away with it flawlessly (i.e. the kernel).
My TODO list isn't set in stone, it's more or less things I'd *like* to do.
ftjam, perforce jam, bjam, cmake, scons, all of them - they all overcomplicate the process it seems. But again, this is just my opinion which isn't generally the opinion of everyone else.
People often get religious about build systems (like version control systems ;-)) I prefer to discuss about real code and portability: This is a real benefit for end users! Autotools seems over-sized for a small project like libpacman. The real advantage of the autotools system is portability. POSIX conformant configuration scripts create POSIX conformant makefiles. And i hope one day libpacman is used on more platforms than just GNU/Linux. Automake relieves developers from all the details about generating portable standards-compliant Makefiles. This is ease not pain. GNU autotools is the defacto standard build system and other developers/distributions will more likely adopt adopt libpacman if it utilizes autotools. Jürgen