Re: Autoconf/Automake

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Jun 15, 2006, 22:54 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0606151545050.5498@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <20060615211454.GK7766@nowhere.earth>

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.

The kernel makefiles are a pretty extreme example (and it hides a lot of the complexity in files that get included and that most people never ever need to look at). I suspect that git could more easily do something like that (on a _much_ smaller scale - don't get me wrong).

			Linus