Re: build systems

[Braden McDaniel <braden endoframe com>]

On Fri, 2007-11-09 at 12:27 +0100, daniel g. siegel wrote:

[snip]

> please understand, i dont want to bring up a "autotools is bad and it
> should die"-thread, i just want to use my time to code and not to use
> that time and effort on a build system.

It is a fact of life in software development that build systems for
nontrivial projects are themselves nontrivial. Regardless of what build
system is in use, it is simply unrealistic to expect that you should be
insulated from it.

An extremely powerful feature that you get for free with automake is
"make distcheck". The distcheck target builds a distribution, compiles
it, runs tests ("make check"), installs it to a staging area, runs tests
on the installed programs/libraries/whatever ("make installcheck"), and,
if all that succeeded, declares your distribution Ready.

The autotools "replacements" I've encountered do not provide comparable
functionality. While I'm sure that a similar system could be built on
top of many of those replacements, it doesn't appear to be provided by
default the way it is with automake.

And letting the build system tools bear the brunt of the work for this
kind of thing really is the whole point.

-- 
Braden McDaniel                           e-mail: <braden endoframe com>
<http://endoframe.com>                    Jabber: <braden jabber org>