Re: Autoconf/Automake

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Jun 15, 2006, 23:10 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.63.0606160105100.7480@wbgn013.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0606151545050.5498@g5.osdl.org>

Hi,

On Thu, 15 Jun 2006, Linus Torvalds wrote:

Show 16 quoted lines

> On Thu, 15 Jun 2006, Yann Dirson wrote:
> > 
> > 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,
> 
> Oh, I agree. A "simpler" thing that people don't know is often much 
> inferior to a complex thing that people are generally intimately familiar 
> with.
> 
> I just personally believe that autoconf/automake are the worst of both 
> worlds (ie it's a _complex_ thing that a lot of people don't know).
> 
> GNU make in many ways is actually not that bad. Yeah, the makefiles get 
> more complex, but it's usually not totally unreadable, and you can do some 
> clever stuff with it.

I can add to that with first-hand experience of ant and maven.

A whole sh*t-load of people think make is broken. It does not live up to what they want, and it is slow.

And then they invent a _DISEASE_ like ant, which _does not begin_ to sport the features of make.

In a project I am stuck in, maven is used. It tries -- of all things -- to fix a few shortcomings of ant -- which was supposed to fix shortcomings of make! And let's face it. Maven is complicated, slow as a dog lacking all four feet, and it still does not do the things I can do in three lines with make. It's a complete desaster.

So to keep the discussion on topic: tell me what you want to fix wrt the current setup of git, and I'll try to fix it in less than 10 lines of make code. If that is impossible, let's continue then and there with the discussion about a switch to a newer, less tested, replacement of make, okay?

Ciao, Dscho