On Fri, 2005-12-16 at 17:23 +0100, BJörn Lindqvist wrote: > Gnome currently uses the GNU Autotools for building all > projects. Autotools is hard to work with and complicated and there are > lots of techically superior build systems out there. Therefore, I > suggest that GNOME should gradually replace Autotools with scons > (www.scons.org). My arguments are:
> 1. Scons is simply technically superior to GNU Autotools - with a big > margin. > 2. Scons is simple to learn, Autotools is not. Having look at and evaluated Scons for use in migrating from other projects and building new projects... Scons does not really solve the problem of building software better than autotools does. While the base syntax is more forgiving and flexible than autotools, writing your own macros or doing advanced/complicated things with your build process is just as much as a nightmare. In addition to this, there exists today a wide range of precooked autotools macros for implementing many tasks. Additionally, the GNOME macros make implementing builds in autotools almost dreamy and as James pointed out, an autotools generated tarball requires nothing more than a vaguely compliant shell and a vaguely compliant Make to build. One of the problems with autotools is there is a large learning curve towards writing clean autoconf and automake files. Perhaps this can be mitigated through some simpler documentation. I will see about contributing my work's autotools notes back to the community. I do not think we should switch. --d -- Davyd Madeley http://www.davyd.id.au/ 08B0 341A 0B9B 08BB 2118 C060 2EDD BB4F 5191 6CDA _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
