Re: CHECK_STRUCTS/dmpstruct.h mechanism is broken.

[Paul Eggert]

On 4/11/19 2:35 AM, Robert Pluim wrote:
> Much as I dislike Autoconf, what would you have us replace it with?

I was thinking of using just standard tools (as per the GNU Coding
Standards) along with GNU Make - and, once the Emacs core is built, we
can use Emacs itself. Although we started assuming GNU Make in Emacs 25,
we haven't been using GNU Make's features fully and some of its features
could effectively replace the need for Autoconf.

A benefit of this approach would be faster builds. Right now the biggest
bottleneck on my system is the time to run 'configure' whenever I make a
trivial change to configure.ac or whatever. I *hate* that.

Although I looked into other possible approaches (switching to SCons,
say) none of them seemed to offer compelling advantages to the
more-conservative approach I have in mind.

Eric Raymond reported success with this sort of approach when
deautoconfiscating giflib and the NTP code base:

https://lists.gnu.org/r/bison-patches/2019-02/msg00041.html

It'd take some work to do this for Emacs - among other things, Gnulib
would need to support building without Autoconf, at least for the Gnulib
modules that Emacs uses. But I think it'd be doable.