Re: individual software releases for third parties

[Julio Merino <julio%meroh.net@localhost>]

On Thu, Aug 30, 2012 at 9:20 AM, Patrick Welche <prlw1%cam.ac.uk@localhost> 
wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 25, 2012 at 06:53:21PM +0300, Aleksey Cheusov wrote:
>> One more example of how NetBSD tools may become portable without
>> autotools.
>
> I don't see the point of avoiding autotools - {cross,} compiling on
> a variety of architectures is precisely what it is designed to do.

These days, the way I see autotools is as a mechanism to provide a
well-known, relatively sane build environment to users and packagers.
Like it or not, it has become the de facto build system, and pretty
much everybody knows how to use it without further instructions and
all packaging systems support it by default.  (Yes, the real goal of
autotools was/is to allow building on multiple architectures, but the
autotools are not enough for that and most people just have no idea
how to achieve portability.  That's why I see this goal as secondary
nowadays.)

When I used to create lots of packages, every time I had to deal with
a software component that did not use the autotools I wanted to poke
my eyes out. There are tons of little details that you need to
implement to provide a sane build environment, and most of these
"lightweight and/or nih-syndrome replacements" fail in one way or
another.


-- 
Julio Merino / @jmmv