Don't hurry to upgrade was Re: unix style end of lines

[Stefano Rosanelli]

Alle 12:48, sabato 24 gennaio 2004, hai scritto:
> I've been reading gnu build system info pages for a while and now
> I can say they aren't actually so bad :)

I don't think autotools are bad at all. They are a very sophisticated piece of 
software and are widely used. Technically speaking I don't have a real 
argument against (and I don't know autotools internals at all). 

But from a user/developer perspective a lot of people complain because:
* the system is in general counterintuitive and not user friendly
* build problems are difficult to solve
* very few people know REALLY how to use them 
* you may spend a lot of time configuring and setting up the system instead of 
coding

You can say that what's complicated cannot really be simplified but... here's 
an example of SCons.
Say you want to build a shared library, you have 4 source files foo.cpp/h, 
kfoo.cpp/h. With SCons you create a 2-lines script

env=Environment()
env.SharedLibrary('foo', ['foo.cpp', 'kfoo.cpp'])

just type 'scons' and your 'libfoo.so' is ready!
You see: no m4, no .in, no .am .. no other files to maintain, no buildfile 
creation.
As much as things get more complicated (dependencies, compiler flags, other 
libs etc) the script may become more complicated too, but generally it will 
remain very short and simple.

Here SCons is just an example of a different build approach, not to forget 
that it's not a complete autotools substitute but just a build-system 
[altough someone is working on configure-like features].

Stefano


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