Re: [Vala] Vala autoconf macro

[pancake <pancake youterm com>]

On Tue, 2008-08-19 at 22:13 +0100, Sam Liddicott wrote:
> You just shot your argument when you said nobody cares about max length of command line argument.
>
> Some people and systems do, autoconf works where wafs doesn't.
>
> I'm not going to learn wafs and you seem to show it is less complete than autoconf.... :-)
>
> I vote for autoconf anyway.
>
> Sam

few time ago I wrote 'acr' an auto-conf-replacement. I decided to do it
in shellscript, so it is a single shellscript that generates shellscript
and executes shellscript. this is a third-level of recursivity which is
quite funny.

Currently I use ACR for most of my projects because is something mostly
compatible with autotools but the final script only takes 15K instead of
the 300KB of shellscript keeping the portability. So i have use it on
solaris, *bsd, windows and gnu/linux.

GNU autotools is broken from the roots, and ACR too, but ACR is funny
and 'ea-ci-er' to use, maintain, develop and fits better with my needs.

Obviusly, depending on o posix-shell is something that breaks the
portability, not only because shellscript depends on more external
programs and this forces to do lot of fork()'s which is slow and highly
unportable. (I have never understood, how GNU ppl can defend autotools
on GNU/Hurd where fork is 30 times slower). Using this system on windows
makes you depend on a pseudo-unix environment, which is a broken
concept. And windows is not the only non-posix system available in the
hood. Processing strings and so with awk/sed/... is the WORST thing you
can do if you expect portability and performance. This is soemthing
native in python or in any other language but shellscript.

Just read this:

  http://autoconf-archive.cryp.to/ac_c_bigendian_cross.html

I had never imagine that checking for endianness can be something that
long, and without supporting middle endianness(R).

Nowadays I am starting to get interest on WAF. Depending on python is
not that hard dependency (ok..i would prefer to do it in LUA, but python
is more easy to find on most of the systems). From my POV, waf is on
WIP, this means that some basics of the API are changing and forcing you
to rewrite the wscripts to keep on the mainstream (that's good, this is
something that intel or autotools has never understood), since not much
time ago, vala was a not very stable language (from the syntax pov).
this is because the refactoring. When you dont have a huge amount of
people using it, or the people that uses this system is enought flexible
to adapt to this.

btw you can embed the waf script in your project (this is 80KB) so you
will not need to depend to have the required waf version installed on
your system.

btw, i think that waf needs more work, it is not a stable build system,
but it's currently much better than other options like autotools for
developing.

If you want to read moar on ACR:

  http://news.nopcode.org/miau/pvc.cgi?prj=acr

BTW You always have the last word for deciding the build system of your
project ;)

--pancake