Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 06 Jul 2007 05:16:02 -0400 | From | Jeff Garzik <> | Subject | Re: [ANNOUNCE] util-linux-ng 2.13-rc1 |
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Gerd Hoffmann wrote: > 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 ...
It's not _just_ makefiles, though. Packaging systems know what to do with configure scripts, and automatically plug that into their systems, e.g. with rpm's %configure, %make_install, etc.
Having ported an entire distro, the time savings with autotools [OR ANOTHER STANDARD BUILD/CONFIGURE SYSTEM] are very real. Similarly, the time sink with each project doing its own home-rolled build/configure system is also very real.
Jeff
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