autoconf trouble

[Daniel Stone]

On Fri, 2005-09-09 at 17:17 +0200, Enrico Weigelt wrote:
> * Daniel Stone <daniel at fooishbar.org> wrote:
> > You would have just as much trouble putting your sysroot 
> > solution into hand-hacked Makefiles as with autoconf, if not more.  
> 
> No. I just have to prepend $(SYSROOT) to all appropriate pathes
> (ie. -L, -I, .la, ...). The right places are easy to find, if 
> the makefile, or probably it's source is human readable.

Yes, and there are about ten thousand of them.  But I digress.

> > We maintained our own build system with Imake.  And that sucked.  
> What's wrong with it ? 
> I hat never problems with it. But I have big problems w/ autoconf
> almost every day.

Try running it on a platform other than Linux/i386, then.  We were our
own porters.

> > 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.
> This is exactly, what autotools does *NOT* provide.
> It is as deterministic as the weather. Probably nice for folks
> building evrything by themself on their own machine, but very 
> ugly for distributors/maintainers working in mission critical 
> environments.

You're speaking to someone who's been maintaining X for two
distributions, for four years.  autotools is a vast improvement over
imake from my point of view as both a developer and a maintainer.

> Long long time ago, I've made several proposals for really strict
> and deterministic buildsystem. If some more folks had have been
> listening to me, we already could have it working for month and
> an package's individual build stuff wouldn't be more than a simple
> text file of about 1k ...

Proposals are uninteresting.

If we'd spent all this time writing our own build system from scratch
(which is non-trivially difficult -- just ask KDE), we'd be even further
behind on the 6.9/7.0 release than we are now, and we'd have an
unmaintained build system in a couple of years, when everyone had gotten
bored of writing a build system.

autotools is not perfect.  But it is the least bad solution out there,
and I'm taking into account hypothetical proposals for amazing
deterministic build systems that someone would write.  As it is, we have
a solution that works out of the box for everyone.  I don't see the
problem.