Re: build systems

[Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>]

On Fri, 2007-11-09 at 12:27 +0100, daniel g. siegel wrote:
> hello!
> 
> i will begin this mail with a warning:
> **************************************
> this topic is highly dangerous, it could result in flame-wars,
> holy-wars, suicide, death or murdering. so please be kind and nobody
> will get hurt (even not your cat or your hamster) and vincent may gets
> an ice cream ;)
> **************************************
> 
> now, as some of you know, cheese uses toc2 as build system. why? will
> some of you ask, he could have used autofoo too! well, it wasnt just "i
> dont like autofoo and therefore..", the whole decision was made in
> several weeks and i really tried autofoo (and got about 7 patches, which
> autofoo'd cheese). i want to tell you what kept me off from autotools:
> 
> it always takes three steps
> ===========================
> most projects in the unix world, who have compiled a package by themself
> know that three-step ./configure && make && make install. and in my
> opinion i really like it, its simple and gives (at least it should) you
> enough options to install it how and where you want. this is fine, but
> there are some cases, where this drove me crazy. do i really want to
> look through a 1000-lines Makefile and edit my things there, thats just
> far to complicate as it really doesnt have any structure. editing
> Makefile.in or configure.ac directly? see next point
> 
you should be editing Makefile.am not Makefile.in, that's why you got
fed up of autofoo :-)

...

I think there are just very few people that love autofoo
inconditionally, but it has some features that, from what you say about
toc2, make it necessary, like building in all Linux flavors, for
instance.

When we have something prettier than autofoo that supports everything
that autofoo does, I wouldn't mind changing
-- 
Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>