Re: autotools gives autopain

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Fri, 2005-12-16 at 17:23 +0100, BJ�Lindqvist wrote:
> (Sorry for the inflammatory subject, it is meant to be
> humoristic. Although it's true :))
> 
> Gnome currently uses the GNU Autotools for building all
> projects. Autotools is hard to work with and complicated and there are
> lots of techically superior build systems out there. Therefore, I
> suggest that GNOME should gradually replace Autotools with scons
> (www.scons.org). My arguments are:
> 
> 1. Scons is simply technically superior to GNU Autotools - with a big
>    margin.
> 
> 2. Scons is simple to learn, Autotools is not.
> 
> 3. KDE has already migrated to scons.
> 
> I suggest people give scons a try and it will become apparent how good
> scons is (and how bad autotools is). Now my counter-arguments to the
> counter-arguments I'm sure people will come up with:

[snip some good counter-arguments]

One thing we have to consider is that a few modules provide
build utilities for other modules to use: intltool, gtk-doc,
and gnome-doc-utils are a few.  Pretty much anything that
provides a library probably uses gtk-doc.  Anything providing
user help should use gnome-doc-utils.  And almost every Gnome
module is probably using intltool.

Of course, all this means is that these tools will need to
provide whatever it is one provides for scons to do the same
tricks.  And that's probably a good thing anyway, because it
opens the door for other packages to use scons, even if our
core packages don't.

So, I suppose I should go learn scons so I can provide scons
love in gnome-doc-utils.  It was on my agenda anyway, just
not very high on the priority list.

--
Shaun