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Re: [Chicken-hackers] relevance of autoconf - automake wiki entry?


From: felix winkelmann
Subject: Re: [Chicken-hackers] relevance of autoconf - automake wiki entry?
Date: Mon, 20 Nov 2006 10:12:40 +0100

On 11/20/06, Brandon J. Van Every <address@hidden> wrote:
Wiki pages are really good at advertizing themselves.  The User's Manual
page http://chicken.wiki.br/The%20User%27s%20Manual
like all wiki pages, has a list of "Pages linking here:".  In that list,
with star marquee billing since there aren't very many entries, is the
link for the "autoconf - automake" wiki page.
http://chicken.wiki.br/autoconf%20-%20automake

This I don't like.  It encourages someone reading the User's Manual for
the 1st time to think that Chicken is autoconf-oriented, and that users
should do the autoconf drill / learning curve to play well with
Chicken.  I realize not everyone may be ready to go forwards with CMake,
but I don't like explicitly encouraging people to go backwards to
Autoconf.  Especially since, the only reason this link appears is to
say, "We're using the same examples as we've been using elsewhere in the
User's Manual."  If that's not deemed to be terribly important wisdom to
impart to people, I'd ask that it be removed or refactored somehow, so
that Autoconf is not getting top billing on the 1st User's Manual page.

Note that the automake/autoconf page is about packaging applications
written with Chicken, and does not touch chicken's build process itself.


My next question is whether this autoconf - automake page is deemed
important and is in active development / drafting, or whether it's a
vestige of some past effort that didn't go anywhere and likely won't go
anywhere.  If the latter, I ask that it be removed.

I'm happy to provide CMake instructions on the wiki if that is deemed
useful.  It's not clear to me who the target audience is for this
"autoconf - automake" page anyways.  I'm not well versed in how people
have typically built things on top of Chicken.  Eggs have some build
capabilities, but not everything is an egg.

I think this is a very good idea: if you could provide CMake-specific
instructions on the wiki, you would both help users and provide an
alternative (once you link to the Manual from your page).

I understand your effort to make CMake more prominent, and I dislike
autotools at least as much as you do. But for many UNIX users it is still the
more portable (yes, a very very fragile form of "portable") or easier
to use (This will hopefully change.in the future, but unfortunately we are
not there yet). But this doesn't mean that the wiki shouldn't contain
instructions on how to integrate code with those tools. Users should get
any support that can be provided.


cheers,
felix

--
http://galinha.ucpel.tche.br:8081/blog/blog.ssp




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