Re:Autotools Mythbuster
by buserror on Thursday December 17, 2015 @12:47PM
(#10752974)
While I also spend my day compiling packages [0] -- well CROSS COMPILING packages, and the worst problem I have, bar none, is autocrap.
Not only is it a giant pile of poo to try to 'repair' when it invariably does something the wrong way (like trying to fish my host's headers), but when compiling a distro, it's also the single tool that takes the most io/cpu of the host; forget compiling C++ - when you add up the zillion's time autocrap tries to see if I have strtok() in my C headers (hint, I do, since 1991); and then doing it again, over and over and over and over, the /compile/ time becomes rather negligible in comparison to the /autocrap/ time (especially on a modern host with -j12).
The thing is, in MOST CASES you could do it all with a page of gmake. pkg-config and all that are excellent at removing the need for autocrap. gmake has made heaps and bounds at simplifying what used to be the nightmarish Makefiles.
Not only is it a giant pile of poo to try to 'repair' when it invariably does something the wrong way (like trying to fish my host's headers), but when compiling a distro, it's also the single tool that takes the most io/cpu of the host; forget compiling C++ - when you add up the zillion's time autocrap tries to see if I have strtok() in my C headers (hint, I do, since 1991); and then doing it again, over and over and over and over, the /compile/ time becomes rather negligible in comparison to the /autocrap/ time (especially on a modern host with -j12).
The thing is, in MOST CASES you could do it all with a page of gmake. pkg-config and all that are excellent at removing the need for autocrap. gmake has made heaps and bounds at simplifying what used to be the nightmarish Makefiles.
[0]: I'm the author of https://github.com/buserror/minifs