On Tue, Jan 16, 2007 at 11:59:27AM +0100, Darren Reed wrote: > What I mean is that you cannot checkout any source code from the > opensolaris.org server and expect to run "./configure && make && make > install" > on any platform. If we ever want to make opensolaris code portable and
And every day I thank my lucky stars for that. Autotools/libtool are some of the worst pieces of software ever written. They bloat makefiles with incomprehensible crap, stuff the build process into a cast-iron straitjacket, and more often than not fail to generate optimal or even working programs on anything other than GNU/Linux systems (and not all of those, either). Please do not go down this path. Not for NWAM, not for anything. A simple set of small traditional makefiles is easier to maintain, easier to debug, and easier to port. If I had any spare time, I'd be going the opposite direction, replacing the autotools garbage in SFW and the Companion with simple makefiles. The era of a million tiny Unices, all different, has long since passed; there are very few platforms of any importance today, and even if you had to write a couple of makefile includes for each of them you'd end up spending less time and energy doing that than making autotools work correctly. None of this even begins to address the rather bizarre question of why code destined for ON needs to be portable to other environments. It means only that if for some reason that's believed to be a requirement, autotools is not the way to meet it. If people want to type configure; make; make install, provide configure as a trivial wrapper on bldenv. Not autoconf, and especially not libtool. No. No, no, no. Never. Please. -- Keith M Wesolowski "Sir, we're surrounded!" FishWorks "Excellent; we can attack in any direction!" _______________________________________________ opensolaris-code mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/opensolaris-code
