Re: [Beaver-devel] About autotools and portability

[Tobias Heinzen]

Higor Eurípedes wrote:
> A friend of mine tried to compile Beaver under FreeBSD but didnt succeed
> so i decided to use autotools with beaver to improve portability.
>
> After 3 (stressing) days i got it working today under those platforms:
>
> Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex)
> Debian 5.0 (Lenny)
> FreeBSD 7.1
>
> I think its possible to compile beaver under cygwin too.
>
> Here is the tarball i created :
> http://enygmata.site88.net/patches/beaver0.4.0/beaver0.4.0.tar.gz
>
> I ask you guys to test it before commit into the repository (if approved).
> The sourcefiles (.c) might not be up to date.
>
> Added files:
>
> Makefile.am
> autogen.sh
> configure.in
> src/Makefile.am
> src/api/Makefile.am
> plugins/mkmakefile.sh
> build/                        (directory)
> build/pkg.m4
>
> Removed files:
>
> Makefile
> configure
> src/Makefile
> plugins/Makefile
>
> bye!
>   
hi all

first of all I wanted to wish you a merry Christmas (okay it's a little 
bit late :-))

thanks for the work Higor. well I personally do not like the autotools 
at all. that has different reasons:

1) the configure checks does a lot of checks which are completely 
useless and does not really help in ensuring that the build environment 
is correctly set up. for example it checks if "stdlib.h" and "string.h" 
is installed. but does not check for example for "stdio.h". and why 
check for these anyway. and i often had scripts that checked a lot, 
everything went fine and it didn't work after all.

then on the other hand, really important things not get checked. for 
example: I've got a 64bit system and for that system the flag "-fPIC" 
has to be used otherwise beaver will not work properly. why does 
autotools does not get that? is this configurable? especially nowadays a 
lot of systems are 64bit so why not check it?

2) it makes developping a lot harder. if there are warnings or errors, 
they are hard to find in all that stuff that get's scrolled. well it 
looks cool, but it doesn't really help me in developping. and where in 
the hell to I set the debug level? (well that probably is a bug of me 
:-) I think I'm just to stupid to find it, but then again, why hide it 
in those god awful configuration files?) and no: using "make 
install-strip" to remove the debugging level is just not the right way 
to do it, because all the optimizations are not done.

the fact that you had 3 days speaks for itself. I had a lot less time 
for creating the configure script.

3) the autotools compile a lot into the programs that were never used. 
why is the program 65kB bigger and has a 2MB bigger memory footprint? 
especially for our project where we want a small memory footprint this 
is not feasible. it's just not transparent enough. it does not really 
say what it does.

This is not a critic against you Higor. It's just that the autotools are 
old and completely useless in my opinion. There are sadly no 
alternatives and I never have seen a build system that does it all 
right. Nonetheless I've got some things to say about your changes:

a) I saw that you created a library out of the API.  Well this is not 
needed and it won't work with the actual code anyway (especially when 
you then link the plugins against this library, and if you don't then 
there's no sense in using a library anyway). The plugin system is 
designed to not need any shared library. The way you use it now is just 
to create an archive file and then compile it into the main program, 
which would be the same thing as just compiling it all in the first place.

The second thing is, that the Makefile (which get's called from the 
other Makefiles) is not that easy to maintain, but it should be.

b) as I stated above, I do not like it, if it produces a lot of nonsense 
terminalscrolling text, which is useless in most of the time. I like how 
the kernel get's compiled and that's why I designed my Makefiles after 
that. Is this somehow possible to do with the autotools? To find warning 
and errors is really hard and makes my eyes hurt.

c) the plugins Makefile and mkmakefile.sh does not work for me. Also I 
do not like if you have to use autotools to write some plugin. In my 
system you only had to copy paste the Makefile and everything worked. 
Here nothing worked for me? Or did I just used it wrong?

I see, that if we want that beaver is portable we have to use some sort 
of configuration script. I had no problem in compiling beaver with my 
old machine (an ubuntu system) and with my new system (a gentoo system; 
okay on gentoo mostly everything works ^^). I would like to know what 
the problem was with freebsd? probably some paths were wrong?

Again, I want to stress out, that this is not a criticism against you, 
but I just really hate autotools. If you could work the things out I 
stated above than I would be happy.

Greets
Tobias