[OT] Thank you for not using autoconf

Laurent Bercot ska-dietlibc at skarnet.org
Sat Jun 1 00:36:16 UTC 2013


On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 02:46:51PM -0400, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> not to go way off topic for this list

 Ah, if you start advocating one way, it's only fair that people
advocate the other way. :)


> autotools tends to work a lot more reliably than
> $random-build-system-of-the-day.

 That's a testimony to the suckiness of $random-build-system-of-the-day,
not a proof that autotools work well. They don't. They probably suck
less than most of the things you see, but they still suck.
 One simple example: I could *never* make autotools understand that I
wanted to compile natively for i386, *but* wanted to use the diet libc
instead of the glibc. Never. To make it work, I had to use horrible hacks
that would make your ears bleed. I'm still ashamed of those today.


> the amount of plumbing busybox has to make it work is not trivial.  it's 
> certainly not something most projects should pick up.

 I agree with this. It has to be done right, which is hard.
Busybox does it right. autotools do it better than uninformed, naive
attempts, so they're a reasonable default solution when better
alternatives are unavailable, but that doesn't mean they're good.

(And yes, I have written my own cross-compilation system. It's far from
perfect, but it works.)

-- 
 Laurent


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