Re: autoconf: Does it meet these cross-platform goals?

[Stepan Kasal]

Hello Matt, Ralf,

On Tue, Apr 04, 2006 at 02:25:03PM +0200, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> * Ed Hartnett wrote on Tue, Apr 04, 2006 at 01:58:39PM CEST:

> > The autotools way is hard at first but scales very well.
> 
> There are some known scaling issues that come with the autotools, [...]

I this this might cause misunderstanding:

Ed explained that there is some work needed to set up autotools for the
project, but then you can easily add support for more and more platforms.

And I think he was right here, the initial work really pays off.

Ralf's comment is related to another scaling:

The extra infrastructure costs something.  (If you wanted extra-quick
builds, you'd use hand-crafted build environment, of course.)
Our scaling here could be better: when the project is more and more
``complicated,'' the builds are slower and slower.

But what does the ``complicated'' mean here?  Basically, as your project
has more and more subdirectories and shared libraries, and as also as you
add support for more and more totally different platforms, the build slows
down.

But I don't think this is a big problem in practice, so you shouldn't be
much afraid.

I'm not sure I succeeded in my attempt to clarify this issue.
In any case, I believe that if you want to support many platforms,
autotools are the way to go.

Have a nice day,
        Stepan Kasal