Some thoughts on the modularization effort

[Keith Packard]

Around 19 o'clock on Mar 30, Adam Jackson wrote:

> libtool is overkill for X's needs.  The most complex thing we need to do in 
> terms of DSO generation is not link the server modules against the system 
> libraries, and specify precise sonames.  Every ld I know of has a pretty 
> painless way to do this; on gnu toolchain systems, where apparently libtool 
> works best, it's trivial, so why use libtool in the first place.

I started autotooling fontconfig by following recommendations from some 
mozilla developers who encouraged me to bail on automake and libtool.  I 
regretted it almost immediately.  automake+libtool eliminate all of the 
per-platform configuration hassle while autoconf alone does not.

Autoconf *allows* host-specific configuration, but it doesn't provide any 
automatically.  I'm not interested in supporting yet another custom-to-X
configuration system, and autoconf alone would be precisely that.

Like Daniel says, autotools is far from the perfect system, but it has the 
tremendous advantage of being actively supported by a large community who 
actually work to make the tools useful in general and not just for a 
specific project.  I've been very happy with the automake packages I've 
developed.  It has lots of nice features missing from imake, like built-in 
distribution generation support which even includes running appropriate 
validation of install/deinstall and even test cases for the built 
applications.

And, I've had good interactions with the autotools developers in getting 
problems resolved, which is certainly better than fixing imake myself 
again.

-keith


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