Re: individual software releases for third parties

[tlaronde%polynum.com@localhost]

On Fri, Aug 24, 2012 at 06:45:07PM -0400, Mouse wrote:
> 
> > Some thoughts on this:
> [...]
> > - as applicable autoconf (or consistent simple environment detection
> > build script) or portable simple makefile.
> 
> http://ftp.rodents-montreal.org/mouse/blah/2009-11-20-1.html (also
> available via FTP, for the three or four people who, like me, prefer to
> avoid HTTP and are prepared to read HTML files as plain text) goes into
> some minor length about autoconf and the like; I recommend it to anyone
> who cares about my opinions.

I will add to this that the GNU autoconf/automake is made for building
softwares for which, by design, nothing is known:

- developers do not know what they do and what they use, at least what
standards they use; so configure guesses... (and since nothing is taken
for granted, a project generally copies configure files and simply add
further tests instead of starting from scratch.)

- configuration ignores where it runs and so configure, even if run on
a known system, guesses again and again what the system offers...

- configuration makes generally one assumption (the worst one): that
the target is equal to the matrix, that is that there is no
cross-compilation. Trying to guess if something works by running it will
not do in this case.

It cost me less time to build a compilation framework of my own than to
try to understand how to use autoconf/automake... which I didn't want to
use and to depend on, due to the way it works.

And BTW, I have added from the very beginning the SAVE_SPACE option,
that allows to remove all intermediary products once the final target of
a Makefile is built, thus reducing drastically the space needed to
build things.  Neither GNU auto framework nor NetBSD mk one offer
this. Hence the benefit of redoing things sometimes...

-- 
        Thierry Laronde <tlaronde +AT+ polynum +dot+ com>
                      http://www.kergis.com/
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