Re: Autoconf/Automake

From: Yann Dirson <ydirson@altern.org>
Date: Jun 15, 2006, 21:14 UTC
Message-ID: <20060615211454.GK7766@nowhere.earth>
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:

Show 9 quoted lines

> Too many developers shrug off the "it's hard to use" argument. THEY think 
> it's fine. THEY think it's "lack of training". THEY think the tools are 
> fine, and the problem is the user.
> 
> THEY are wrong.
> 
> Almost every time when a user says "it's hard to use", the user is right. 
> Sometimes it's a lack of documentation, but quite often it's just that the 
> tool interfaces are bad.

In tha case of jam, the doc issue can certainly be raised, but the most prominent problem is probably that everyone and their dog knows make, and expects a replacement to work in a similar fashion. The current documentation and tutorial unfortunately does not show precisely how people used to "make" can easily switch to jam.

For those not knowing about jam, I'd say the 1st thing to anchor in one's mind is that jam gives complete (programmatic) control on the dependency tree (eg. you just have to write once that the results of a compilation have to be removed by "jam clean", and everytime you declare a file to be built with your rule, you don't have to remember to add it to the Clean rule - and more importantly, as soon as you remove that declaration, you don't have to fear the Clean target to remove it, in case it would be precious).

Show 10 quoted lines

> Sometimes the problem space makes the interfaces fundamentally hard. But 
> sometimes the program itself just makes things ugly and hard, and autoconf 
> and automake definitely didn't make it easier for users - they were 
> designed for people who knew fifteen different versions of UNIX, and not 
> for sane people.
> 
> 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.

Right, autoconf would be much more sane if it would not insist on supporting vintage unices. OTOH, people having to work on these systems (eg. for professional reason - not everyone has the luck to work with modern systems all the time) are more than happy to be able to build some recent tools to make there task easier. Except when it fails in that task (eg. a configure script for the bash package failing to run on an years-old lynxos version because of a sh bug on the OS), it still does a wonderful job in the end.

But I agree having to carry all this compat stuff, when one just wants to benefit from higher-level features (like those mentionned by Oliver), is annoying. Maybe the support for legacy platforms could be restricted in some way to the bare minimum. Eg. using a "legacy" backend where the cruft would go, and stubs for modern things, that would generate a hopefully-more-portable-but-limited ./configure-simple script, and a "modern" backend generating a sane full-fledged bash script.

But I'm going off-topic :)

Best regards,

-- 
Yann Dirson    <ydirson@altern.org> |
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