Re: Mac OS X Snow Leopard and 64-bit applications
Re: Mac OS X Snow Leopard and 64-bit applications
- Subject: Re: Mac OS X Snow Leopard and 64-bit applications
- From: Andrew Gallatin <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 31 Aug 2009 14:19:13 -0400
Mo McRoberts wrote:
On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 18:40, Andrew Gallatin<email@hidden> wrote:
Mo McRoberts wrote:
On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 18:22, Andrew Gallatin<email@hidden>
wrote:
Nice sentiment, but none of the alternatives to
autoconf+autoconf+(g)libtool have proven themselves to be anything but
Did you mean automake, rather than the second autoconf?
Oh, yes—fingers/brain not appropriately coupled, it’d seem!
OK, then I disagree with you 66%. IMHO, autoconf is a necessary evil,
but automake and libtool are just pure evil that do nothing
but increase obfuscation and frustration.
libtool is the most useful of the lot—dealing with the arcane and
entirely propriety requirements for building dynamic libs on every
platform (especially accounting for dependencies between libraries
properly) is something best left to somebody who has the opportunity
to focus on them, rather than the app developer, who inevitably gets
it wrong for many platforms.
If you never intend to support odd platforms, it may not
be too evil. But once you go beyond linux or BSD and have
no longer have a GNUish envoronment, then it gets ugly fast.
I once spent about 2 days trying to get libtool to work on Aix.
MacOSX was pretty miserable with libtool back in the early
days (2002 or so). It may have improved.
It is far easier to simply do the link commands by hand, and
substitute the correct link command using autoconf. When
something doesn't work, its fairly obvious what's not working,
and you don't have to look through hundreds or thousands of
lines of poorly documented script code to fix somebody's
linux-ism (or bash-ism, which winds up being the same thing).
automake has its uses, too; primarily because it integrates with
libtool nicely, but also because it manages dependency tracking
transparently, and deals with recursion properly. It’s perhaps
overkill for a single-dir utility, but for a large cross-platform
project it’s fairly essential.
I work on a project that we distribute only source for and runs on
any Linux distro for the last 5 years or so, MacOSX 10.3+,
Solaris 10+, FreeBSD 5.x +, many different Windows
versions and probably a few platforms I'm forgetting. Around
300K LOC in ~70 directories. We wouldn't touch automake or
libtool with a 10 foot poll.
Anytime I ever see anybody using automake I just cringe.
I have problems getting even trivial projects to build unless
I use the exact same machine and path as the developer who
initiated the project. I guess there needs to be an auto-something
to make automake portable :)
Drew
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