On Sat, 10 Jan 2004, Mario Klebsch wrote:
> I never understood why so many people consider these autotools easier
> to use than the imake system. Imake (or to be precise, the config files
They are not - within the imake build system. Outside it, there are two
issues
a) accommodating mis-installed or obsolete imake config files
b) setting different compile-time options.
> included with X11) knows everything about the local X11 installation,
> where configure has to guess and far too often guesses wrong. I really
> do see no benefit in not using the imake system and I must admit that I
> do not understand why configure does not use an Imakefile to find out
> all the details needed to compile X11 programs on a given platform.
I do that with xterm (but see (a) above).
> When I did not know the details of how the automatically generated
> configures work, I often spend hours on getting this fu**ing configure
> to detect the correct settings for X11. Today, I know, that I simply
> can edit config.status and execute it afterwards, but this 'feature'
> seems to be kept secret.
>
> I hope X11 will keep the imake system. However if these efforts do get
> configure to reliably detect the X11 specific settings, I would be
> happy if this stuff is included in X11, so this pain finally get to an
> end.
It'll take these people a long time to make it work properly other than
for the trivial case of different Linux configurations, e.g., where the
difficult autoconf checks are glossed over by hardcoding things.
--
Thomas E. Dickey
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net
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