On Wed, Jan 23, 2008 at 06:17:49PM -0500, Eric S. Raymond wrote: > It is probably not newws to anyone on this list that autotools has > turned into more trouble than it is really worth. I am pretty expert > with it based on many years of experience, but I reached my personal > limit recently while attempting to fix bug #8635.
Mmh, I like autotools. It is very portable and once you understand the basics you can easily extent it by using ordinary shell code. Do not have other build systems to solve the same problems: which library to use for linking which default compiler flags ... There exist many build systems which just hardcode these information (last time I checked, Qt's qmake or tmake was one example) and are that's why useless. > There are only two people on the Wesnoth project who understand our > autotools-based build machinery at all well. The other besides myself All others are free to learn it. I really wonder why it isn't probably used by Wesnoth people a lot on non-Unix systems. At least adding new files to Makefile.am's is trivial but IIRC didn't always happen. > is Isaac de Clerencia, who is mostly inactive these days. Notably, > our release manager *doesn't* really grok our build machinery. This > adds up to a significant maintainance vulnerability. I'm always willing to help once I know about problems. I provided e.g. a minor patch (or better: just a reference) to integrate Boost. Don't forget that autotools are much easier to use (but probably not to write) because ./configure make make install are very common steps. > Ivanovic and I have agreed it's time to find a better build system. Maybe it would be an option to just keep autotools and Makefile.am's even after changing to another system? You can mark support for it as deprecated but just support applying patches? Don't forget that autotools is a well known standard. I also like it just "for playing around" and learn it ... I'm curious: How many people do you expect to become familiar with a new system? Jens _______________________________________________ Wesnoth-dev mailing list Wesnoth-dev@gna.org https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/wesnoth-dev
