Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 06 Jul 2007 11:01:07 +0200 | From | Gerd Hoffmann <> | Subject | Re: [ANNOUNCE] util-linux-ng 2.13-rc1 |
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Jeff Garzik wrote: > Christoph Hellwig wrote: >> And this is really dumb. autotools is a completely pain in the ass and >> not useful at all for linux-only tools. > > A myth. It is quite useful for packagers, because of the high Just > Works(tm) factor. After porting an entire across several revisions of a > distro, the autotools-based packages are the ones that work out of the > box 90% of the time.
And the 10% where it doesn't work it is a real pain to figure what goes wrong due to the completely unreadable Makefiles generated by autotools. After all they are not Makefiles, they are shellscripts embedded into Makefiles.
> The other 90% of _my_ time comes from annoying people who roll their own > Makefile/build solution, which the packager has to then learn.
Well, it's not *that* hard to write makefiles which follow the usual gnuish conventions, so stuff like "make DESTDIR=/tmp/buildroot install" works just fine. That isn't a reason to use autotools. Especially as people get that wrong *even with* autotools from time to time ...
cheers,
Gerd
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