Re: Autoconf/Automake

From: Olivier Galibert <galibert@pobox.com>
Date: Jun 15, 2006, 17:48 UTC
Message-ID: <20060615174833.GA32247@dspnet.fr.eu.org>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0606150954430.5498@g5.osdl.org>

On Thu, Jun 15, 2006 at 10:02:10AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> These days, there aren't fifteen different versions of UNIX. There's a 
> couple, and it's perfectly ok to actually say "fix your damn system and 
> just install GNU make". It's easier to install GNU make than it is to 
> install autoconf/automake.

You should be careful to separate autoconf and automake. Autoconf is not so bad, and you can make clean, maintainable Makefile.in and config.h.in files with it, because it uses simple substitution. It is quite useful to detect available librairies when some are optional, and also to lightly[1] ensure that prefix and friends will stay the same between make and make install. Also, especially if you hack a little bit to alias 'enable' and 'with', you get a sane interface to optional feature selection. Oh, and to seperate compilation directories too (vpath generation).

OTOH, automake is a BDSM session gone bad. The makefiles it generates are atrocious and outdated, even buggy on some lesser makes, which is quite annoying when what you try to build is gnu make.

The worst of the lot is libtool, though. That one explicitely tries to make your experience as painful as possible. Including, but not limited to, hiding the files in dot-directories so that you try to run gdb on a script, relinking at install time, silently removing flags you want to pass to ld or the compiler because it thinks it knows better, locking C++ shared libraries to the exact compiler version that compiled them through the .la file crap, etc.

So, autoconf can be useful.  The rest should die.

OG.

[1] As in, you can still override when running make, but if you don't
    override anything you'll get the value you passed to configure every
    time.