GSoC idea : Revive autotools module

[Vladimir Prus]

On Tuesday, March 29, 2011 22:06:33 Milian Wolff wrote:
> Detlev Casanova, 29.03.2011:
> > Hello !
> 
> Hi! I'm CCing the devel ML, please put further discussion on that list.
> 
> > I mentionned the idea of reviving the autotools module for this google
> > summer of code and on IRC and PovRay seemed to be interrested.
> > 
> > I think the project will fit for a GSoC in amount of work as there are
> > also lots of improvements in autotools (such as caching, colors,
> > progressbars (?), ...). And it would be great to add support for those
> > new features.
> 
> Yes, I would think so as well. Who would step up as a mentor?
> 
> > I'm not familiar with yacc or bison but they don't seem to hard to learn
> > and I have followed a course on lexical parsers this year.
> > Also, I'm only a basic user of autotools and I'm not sure kde can easily
> > find me a mentor who knows it well.
> 
> Indeed, this might be a problem. Personally, I have never used autotools.
> And esp. in KDE there are many people who don't look back on this dark
> chapter of build tools ;-) CMake is much preferred.
> 
> Anyways, maybe there is someone reading who a) knows autotools and b) would
> like to mentor.

I vaguelly fit the bill. Of course, I would much prefer to mentor a project
to add Boost.Build project manager, not autotools ;-)

- Volodya