Re: [Quilt-dev] auto~conf/make

[James Rowe]

On Thu, 6 Feb 2003 17:55:02 +0100
Andreas Gruenbacher <address@hidden> wrote:

> what benefits do you see in switching to Automake? What problems does
> it solve? I consider Automake a major PITA, and  haven't jet seen a
> single project where the additional level of abstraction introduced
> helps more than it hurts.

  I guess it is all down to personal preference, *I* can't think of a
project that hasn't benefited from the additional level of abstraction.

  You can spend days adding extensions to static makefiles just to deal
with problems that have been solved a long time ago with automake.  You
end up continually reinventing the wheel from day one without automake,
just look at the state of the simple quilt makefile.

  For example, the totally non-portable installation process.  Sure you
can fix it, but why?  Moving to automake instantly solves that problem,
and will no doubt solve many in the future.

  It gives you, as a user or developer, access to targets you expect
from a build system nowadays... and not just the ones somebody has got
round to adding manually.  And at what cost to the developer?  Well a
perl installation(and how unlikely are you not to have perl) and in my
opinion a distinct saving in time.  

  Even with the totally segregated Makefile.am's(in the version I posted
a link to) the size of the actual source makefiles are the same(total vs
single Makefile.in from CVS).  That includes support for all the
features from Makefile.in, and instant support for things like package
testing and uninstalling.  And on top of that because of a few choices I
made at the time, and hadn't bothered to change yet for this exact
reason, could have been cut in half probably.

  Really though, I don't have the time(nor the interest) for going in to
this especially when I believe it is going to be totally pointless.

Jay

-- 

www.jnrowe.uklinux.net
GnuPG key fingerprint = 7721 D12B 822B 20FE FCE6  B2B7 7CDF C9DF D16A
87D7

pgpcAWDe1eeBW.pgp
Description: PGP signature