Re: autotools gives autopain

[Stanislav Brabec <sbrabec suse cz>]

BJörn Lindqvist wrote:
> > 1) SCons intentionally ignores most standard *FLAGS (documentation says
> > so).
> According to the devs, that is a feature of scons. This page has a
> workaround: http://www.scons.org/cgi-bin/wiki/ImportingEnvironmentSettings
> Although I think your real problem is badly written SConstruct-files.

Thanks for the link.

It is a feature for reproducible building of a binary. For
distribution-release packaging it is a problem - distribution maintainer
needs to change the whole distribution by changing of a few variables
(e. g. RPM_OPT_FLAGS -> CFLAGS).

> > 2) It is hard to change hardwired default paths and change, say /usr/lib
> > to /usr/lib64 for all packages.
> I think you are being unfair to scons. Ofcourse it is not right to
> hardwire architecture dependent paths in SConstruct-files, but that's
> not a problem with scons, it's a problem with bad SConstruct files.

It is a problem of both, most paths are hardwired in SConstruct files,
the rest in SCons. My problem was
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1368255&group_id=30337&atid=398971

> Likewise, someone could hardwire installation paths in Makefiles.
> Scons really is nothing more than a very nice make-replacement inside
> a very nice programming language. A fairer comparision would be
> bksys/scons (which kde is built with) against autotools/make.

It means, that projects using scons without bksys are in the same
situation as projects using make without autotools 10 years ago.

Autotools were written just to prevent hardwired paths and features in
makefiles. And bksys could change the quality of SConstruct files.

>From the view of the package maintainer, I would prefer move from
make+autotools to bksys+scons and discourage move from autools+make to
plain scons.

-- 
Best Regards / S pozdravem,

Stanislav Brabec
software developer
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