Le jeu. 30 avr. 2020 à 03:30, Alexei Podtelezhnikov <
address@hidden> a écrit :
On Wed, Apr 29, 2020 at 8:34 PM David Turner <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> Starting a thread here to discuss potential build system improvements for FreeType.
>
> The current FreeType 2 build system has many flaws. To its credit, it was designed in a very different time, when things like CMake / Meson / Ninja/ Maven / GN / Bazel didn't even exist, when Autotools was considered the best system to configure your build (ah!), and GNU Make 3.81 was considered new and bleeding edge, and didn't necessarily exist for all platforms. I'm not even sure pkg-config was available on all Linux distros until quite a long time. As I said ... very different times.
Most serious projects I have encountered so far use ./configure; make.
It is the libtool that annoys me. They refused to implement
-fvisibiity=hidden when I asked. They said that libtool was current
when building shared libraries was hard, which is actually true. Let's
just get rid of libtool as whatever it does for us is quite minimal.
As far as I understand, libtool exists because building shared libraries for ten different Unix-like system is a portability nightmare.
On the other hand, building them for a standard Linux distribution, or OS X, is a well known problem, so we may consider keeping autotools/libtool as an escape hatch for esoteric systems that still exist, and use something simpler/better for Linux and OS X?
Alexei