On Fri, Nov 8, 2013 at 12:18 AM, Dan Egli <[email protected]> wrote: > On November 6, 2013, Charles Curley wrote: > >> Autotools is reputed to be an unholy mess, and very difficult to > >> maintain. I have never been able to understand how the whole tool chain > >> works. The lack of documentation didn't help either. > > > > Well, I'll agree on the documentation point. Documentation for the programs > (beyond the miniscule man pages I can sometimes find) would be most helpful. >
Surely you guys are joking about lack of autotools documentation. You realize that all the classic GNU tools are documented extensively in the info system, right? And the texinfo format they're written in has tools for HTML export, so they're all up on the web at gnu.org (among other places) as well. http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/faq/autotools-faq.html http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/autoconf.html http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/automake.html http://www.gnu.org/software/libtool/manual/libtool.html http://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/manual/gnulib.html > >> There are alternatives, such as scons. > > > > Forgive me be a newb on this one, but what the heck is scons, and where do > I find out more about it? :) Sorry, but I'm going to have to send you here for a question like that: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=scons&l=1 > If it will make my configure and > Makefile > files for me so I don't have to handle the whole process manually then I'm > curious about it. I love the ./configure && make && make install sequence, > since it automates so much, but I will agree that using autotools to make > the control files (configure.in, Makefile.in, etc...) is a pain in the A__ > at times. Some other things you might want to look at, if you really want something besides make/autotools: Waf CMake (possibly paired with ninja) Jam tup Maven Ant Rake Shake And there are probably many others I'm not remembering right now. They don't all have quite the same scope, but you may find some combination of things among them that you might like. /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
