Re:A Simple Makefile for Medium-Sized C/C++ Projects
by radarsat1 on Friday August 26, 2016 @01:55PM
(#12368003)
Not only that, but every time I'm up against a problem building software that uses something else, it's like, "oh great now I have to figure out what their secret badly-documented variable names are and how to configure their XML/JSON/YAML/whatever"
It's a pleasure when autotools is used because in generally I know it's going to be nothing much more than
> --with-stuff/--without-stuff
and
> --prefix=$HOME/.local
and when it's not, at least I know I can just grep the shell script and figure it out pretty quickly without having to learn a whole new programming language.
After packaging hundreds of programs for a GNU/Linux distro and dealing with handwritten Makefiles and other so-called autotools replacements: Yes, it is.
If you want someone to be able to build and install your software, just use the Autotools. Yup, they are ugly, but they're still the only set of tools that works acceptably.