Adam Tkac wrote: > I don't think it is a good idea. Autotools might look quite strange > but they are widely used and it is known that they work fine on vast > majority of systems. You are right that compilation of Win executables > might be quite hard but if you get MinGW working it's not problem. > > If we once decided that we will use autotools we should not completely > rewrite our build system every year because something _might_ be > better. Next argument is that noone of developers know scons, I think.
Well, I didn't know AutoTools prior to 3 weeks ago either, but I knew it enough to dislike it. And now that I know more about it, I dislike it even more. My experience thus far with building TigerVNC has been somewhat painful, and it seems to me that AutoTools are primarily to blame. To me, it seems like using AutoTools is a virtual guarantee of incompatibility. They are very tied to a specific version, not of just the AutoMake/AutoConf tools but the whole toolchain (gettext, m4, etc.), and if one of these elements is slightly different, it almost always causes problems. Even when they aren't different, it sometimes still causes problems. For instance, when I first tried building on RHEL 4, I tried changing the entire AutoTools toolchain to match my RHEL 5 system (which had worked fine), but that alone was insufficient to successfully autoreconf everything in TigerVNC. I had to make some slight tweaks to the build scripts to make it work. I recognize that there are other factors that make AutoTools advantageous on Unix, such as the fact that Xorg uses it. However, I am very much a proponent of using a toolchain on Windows that does not require Cygwin. There is currently no way to use AutoConf/AutoMake on Windows without the Cygwin toolchain. It would make sense to me to switch to another build system on Windows, even if we don't switch on Unix. AutoConf/AutoMake is simply not an accepted way of building software among Windows developers. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.net email is sponsored by: High Quality Requirements in a Collaborative Environment. Download a free trial of Rational Requirements Composer Now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/www-ibm-com _______________________________________________ Tigervnc-devel mailing list Tigervnc-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/tigervnc-devel
