autoconf (was: Re: [Gnu-arch-users] [ANNOUNCE] tlator-0.1 initial release)

[Sascha Silbe]

On Wed, Sep 17, 2003 at 04:54:11PM +0400, Samium Gromoff wrote:

> Autoconf is different,
Unfortunately not.

> it is aimed at portability,
Depends on how you define portability. If you include data transparency, 
it certainly isn't portable.
Newer versions choke on paths containing a comma, so e.g. building in 
,,build-something won't work. They are not going to fix this themselves 
(and I do not have enough time to learn m4 and try to understand how 
autoconf works internally). [1]

It's a nightmare for crosscompilation. They're going to make it even 
worse because it's the easier path. [2]
The language used (m4) is hard to grok and makes it easy to write buggy 
macros. Quoting rules are hard to understand.

So my recommendation is: If you can avoid using autoconf, do it.
AFAIR there are alternatives, but I had no need for one in the past (for 
all my projects a simple Makefile suffices), so I did not evaluate them.


[1] http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/autoconf/2002-04/msg00229.html
[2] http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/autoconf/2002-05/msg00025.html 
(whole thread, some mails seem to be missing in the archive)

CU/Lnx Sascha

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