site_archiver@lists.apple.com Delivered-To: darwin-dev@lists.apple.com User-agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.22 (X11/20090608) On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 18:22, Andrew Gallatin<gallatin@cs.duke.edu> wrote: Nice sentiment, but none of the alternatives to autoconf+autoconf+(g)libtool have proven themselves to be anything but 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 _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Darwin-dev mailing list (Darwin-dev@lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/darwin-dev/site_archiver%40lists.appl... Mo McRoberts wrote: On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 18:40, Andrew Gallatin<gallatin@cs.duke.edu> wrote: Mo McRoberts wrote: Did you mean automake, rather than the second autoconf? Oh, yes—fingers/brain not appropriately coupled, it’d seem! This email sent to site_archiver@lists.apple.com