Re: converting netkit to autoconf?

[Russ Allbery]

Bruce Korb <address@hidden> writes:

> http://AutoGen.sourceforge.net/doc/autogen_3.html

> AutoGen quotes are completely isolated from whatever text is specified
> in the template.  That's 'cuz the template author selects appropriate
> ag-quotes for a particular template and it has no effect on any other
> macros or templates that get referenced.  Of course, few people seem to
> figure out what it really is.  :-) It does have all the bells and
> whistles M4 has, though.  Additionally, the macro arguments are named
> instead of positional, which makes it possible to extend functionality
> without obsoleting usage.

The little bit that I played with AutoGen, I found it to be even more
unreadable than Autoconf and a step in the wrong direction.  The template
model moves things even further towards a macro-based text expansion
utility, which is exactly the problem with m4.

In my opinion, the right direction to move for something like Autoconf is
*away* from text processing and towards what Autoconf really is, namely a
programming language for writing testing scripts.  As such, a rewritten
tool to better solve this set of problems should take a higher-level view
of the world, exposing higher-level interfaces to the Autoconf programmer
that allow them to stop thinking of this in terms of a complicated shell
script generator and instead as a configuration testing language that
compiles to something (whether that be shell, C, or something else).

Autoconf has tried very hard to move in this direction, but in the end m4
is still a macro expansion language rather than a programming language in
its basic outlook, which makes it very hard to finish the process (and I
think is a large part of the reason why Autoconf is now so slow).

-- 
Russ Allbery (address@hidden)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>