On Monday 28 April 2008, der Mouse wrote: > Oh, I didn't use configure. configure scripts are horrible > in two big respects[%]: (1) something like half of them get > at least one thing wrong in my experience, and it's hell to > convince them they're wrong when they are - I've typically > ended up applying private patches after running configure in > those cases; (2) they're a security disaster waiting to > happen (very hard to sandbox, mind-numbing to eyeball-check, > much harder to mechanically check out than the program > they're configuring in almost all cases, which adds up to > "perfect trojaning target"). > > [%] I'm not alone in holding this opinion; just today, on > another list, someone said he was "starting to wonder why the > Open Source developers are so enamoured with the use of > libtool, automake & autoconf"....
Only two big respects? I use it only because it seems to be required. It seems to be one of those sacred cows that only outsiders are allowed to criticize. On Thursday 08 May 2008, Bernd Jendrissek wrote: > Those who do not understand the autotools are doomed to > reinvent them :) What amazes me is that the alternatives to autotools are even worse. I think I do understand the requirements, what such a tool should do. With proper direction, a replacement could be within the scope of a SoC project. There was a time I seriously considered putting gnucap aside to make a replacement for autoconf and automake. I have a good bit of it done, but it doesn't have all of the needed targets. I still provide a non-autoconf way to build gnucap, which is what I use in development. My first experience with it was back when most free software was distributed as shar files. Someone made the autoconf stuff for ACS (predecessor to gnucap). He claimed it would make things a lot easier!! I think he was running Linux (an obscure new system that only a few had heard of). I couldn't figure out how to make it work on any system I had access to, which included a BSD system, Sun-OS (pre-Solaris), ultrix, HP-UX, VMS, .... Without it, I had no trouble on any of these, and even Windoze. _______________________________________________ geda-dev mailing list [email protected] http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-dev
