[pacman-dev] CVS update of pacman-lib (TODO.aaron)

[Jürgen Hötzel]

On Wed, Feb 07, 2007 at 01:46:06PM -0600, Aaron Griffin wrote:
> On 2/7/07, Jürgen Hötzel <juergen at 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
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