Re:Autotools Mythbuster
by kazinator on Thursday December 17, 2015 @02:58PM
(#10754062)
autotools isn't mainly a build system; it's a system for preparing a program which will self-configure and build in various systems. Those systems themselves do not have any special tools installed. No Autotools, no GNU-anything.
Autotools was intended to solve the problem of how to give the same tarball of code to a user of SunOS 4, Ultrix, HP-UX 8, and so on, such that each of those users could just unpack the tarball, run ./configure and then make. (Using the make that came with their OS, not CMake, not GNU Make, not gyp and so on).
Some of the requirements don't hold as much any more; you can rely on newer POSIX shell features in a configure script, and GNU make is more widely available and so on, but the basic idea is solid: no requirement for any exotic build system just to get the program running.
It's the implementation that sucks in Autotools. The high level ideas are solid.
Autotools was intended to solve the problem of how to give the same tarball of code to a user of SunOS 4, Ultrix, HP-UX 8, and so on, such that each of those users could just unpack the tarball, run ./configure and then make. (Using the make that came with their OS, not CMake, not GNU Make, not gyp and so on).
Some of the requirements don't hold as much any more; you can rely on newer POSIX shell features in a configure script, and GNU make is more widely available and so on, but the basic idea is solid: no requirement for any exotic build system just to get the program running.
It's the implementation that sucks in Autotools. The high level ideas are solid.