autoconf trouble

[Daniel Stone]

On Fri, 2005-09-09 at 00:59 +0200, Enrico Weigelt wrote:
> * Daniel Stone <daniel at fooishbar.org> wrote:
> > As has been explained before, this is your own local custom 
> > solution, so you will have to support it yourself.  It will 
> > take a *lot* of work.
> 
> Yeah, repairing autoconf will require very much work - I didnt
> expect anything else - probably requires a complete rewrite.
> 
> Dumb question: why the hell autoconf ? what's so wrong with
> carefully hand-written makefiles ? 

You would have just as much trouble putting your sysroot solution into
hand-hacked Makefiles as with autoconf, if not more.  We maintained our
own build system with Imake.  And that sucked.  So one of our goals with
modularisation was to have someone else maintain it, and to have it work
basically everywhere.  autotools was about the only solution that
satisfied this criteria.