"Russ Allbery" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Joe Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
So I must ask why do people dislike the autotools? Are there really
problems that outweigh the benefits of being able to compile the program
on strange architectures with little difficulty? Remember that the
autotools let one compile the program in the same way on a GNU/Linux
system, Cygwin, BSD, and a large number of commercial unixes.
Er, well, kind of. The autotools are one valuable tool to write portable
code. Using them definitely will not make your code portable to all of
those platforms. If the program is non-trivial, you will probably still
have to do some porting.
I did not mean to imply that no porting is never needed. However with fairly
portable code
and properly written configure.ac script very little porting should be
nessisary.
If the autoconf script is properly written, configure will search for the
library to be included for
each of the functions the program uses that does not have just one possible
library.
It will also check that libraries that are needed are installed.
In the case of functions that are somewhat non-standard, configure can
search for other compatable
functions from a list provided by the developer/maintainer. In that case the
function used would be defined as a macro
that uses the compatable function instead.
--
Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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