Re: Automake 1.11.2 released

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Tue, 27 Dec 2011, Dave Hart wrote:
> I do question the usefulness of comparing lines counts of
> Autoconf-generated configure script and source code.  If you're trying
> to elicit support from maintainers of oft-maligned yet widely-used
> autotools, you've chosen an interesting way of warming up your
> audience.

I have been a user of (and proponent of) autotools from the beginning 
and even wrote a Byte magazine article about Autoconf many years ago.

The approach that lzip used satisifies the standard GNU-mandated 
configuration requirements.  Due to using only standard C++, it only 
needs to configure aspects such as the compiler used and installation 
prefix. This approach leads to a very small source package similar to 
that of gzip and bzip2.  The drawback of using standard C++ is that 
C++ has only been standardized since 1998 and a C++-runtime library is 
required in order for lzip to be used.  This means that lzip might not 
be available in every possible circumstance (but there is always the 
gzip fallback).

There is a certain beauty associated with simplicity which was 
appreciated by Kernighan & Pike ("Simplicity, Clarity, Generality") 
but is somehow often lost by today's huge packages.

My most recent experience with building 'xz' dates from this past 
October and it was not a pleasant one since the build failed with 
bizarre linker errors I have not observed while building any other 
package.

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/