Re: Release next week?

[Russ Allbery]

Akim Demaille <address@hidden> writes:

> Hm, how come we face different realities?  Is it something domain
> specific?  For instance, in my case, the last packages I can think about
> that did not use Automake where GAWK and findutils (aside from the
> compiling suites).

Well, just in a quick check of some of the stuff that I've compiled
recently and just judging by whether or not there are Makefile.am files
(so I could miss some automake projects that don't distribute those files
or call them something different), grace, xlispstat, gnuplot, vim, and
xemacs all use autoconf but don't use automake.  Similarly with tiff,
Kerberos, GCC, slang, Berkeley DB, readline, INN, and ncurses.

I can hunt up some more, but that's already a pretty broad cross-section
of free software, including quite a few rather significant packages.  GNU
packages have been tending towards using automake more over the years, but
official GNU packages are in the distinct minority of what I compile.

Personally, I don't use automake because I don't particularly like it
(apologies to the automake developers; the main problem for me is that
it's just not sufficiently different from and sufficiently better than
just writing regular makefiles for it to be worth it to me to put up with
its quirks).  autoconf is more widespread because apart from metaconfig
(which hasn't been publically released in a long time and is much harder
to start using with a new project), it really doesn't have any competition
and doing the same thing by hand is extremely painful.  For most projects,
however, there really isn't much to be gained by using automake over just
writing the makefiles by hand.

And then there are XEmacs and GCC on the other end of the spectrum, where
porting their build systems to automake would be an insane amount of work
and would probably require new functionality in automake, because right
now they're doing way *more* than automake is generally called upon to
deal with.

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