Re: kde moves to scons. The future of autotools?

[Didier Verna]

Bob Friesenhahn <address@hidden> wrote:

> The biggest weakness of the GNU build system is that it makes no assumptions
> about the  installation environment.

        Funny. To me it's the biggest strength. AFAIC, the biggest weaknesses
of the GNU build system are:

1/ to use something as rotten as a macro processor to write the config files.
   If the autotools used a decent scripting language instead of M4 (yet, still
   produce a shell script configure and makefiles) they would have a future.
   It's not the same to require a decent development environement from the
   maintainers and from the end users. They would also be less complex
   internally.

2/ to be very rude on the people that want to use them, but not follow the GNU
   style closely. Currently, if you use the autotools, either you do it the
   GNU way, or you have to hack the internals which is a pain in the neck.


-- 
Didier Verna, address@hidden, http://www.lrde.epita.fr/~didier

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