Re: autotools gives autopain

[Davyd Madeley <davyd madeley id au>]

On Fri, 2005-12-16 at 17:23 +0100, BJ�Lindqvist wrote:

> 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.

Having look at and evaluated Scons for use in migrating from other
projects and building new projects...

Scons does not really solve the problem of building software better than
autotools does. While the base syntax is more forgiving and flexible
than autotools, writing your own macros or doing advanced/complicated
things with your build process is just as much as a nightmare.

In addition to this, there exists today a wide range of precooked
autotools macros for implementing many tasks. Additionally, the GNOME
macros make implementing builds in autotools almost dreamy and as James
pointed out, an autotools generated tarball requires nothing more than a
vaguely compliant shell and a vaguely compliant Make to build.

One of the problems with autotools is there is a large learning curve
towards writing clean autoconf and automake files. Perhaps this can be
mitigated through some simpler documentation. I will see about
contributing my work's autotools notes back to the community.

I do not think we should switch.

--d

-- 
Davyd Madeley

http://www.davyd.id.au/
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