[referencer] Basic question

[Daniel K. O.]

Em 31-03-2011 06:48, John Spray escreveu:
> If you want to learn about build systems then GNU autotools is a bad
> one to learn.  It's ubiquitous for historical reasons, not because
> there's anything beautiful about it.  If you are starting from scratch
> then you should skip autotools and learn CMake or one of the other
> more modern systems (which don't involve arcane macro languages!).  If
> you really truly want to know all about auto tools then the official
> documentation [1] is the place.  However, I can't emphasize enough
> what overwhelmingly poor use of your time it would be to do so.

Of course autotools will be the most difficult tool to learn, it is the
one that solves more problems.

I have been dealing frequently with different build systems () for a few
years now, and from my personal experience the only one that is really
reliable is GNU autotools. Finding the proper library file, to
installing (and uninstalling!) in the proper locations, cross compiling,
even something as trivial as setting compiler and linker flags, or
proper dependency tracking... most tools fail miserably at that. And
CMake is not an exception. Oh yeah, CMake DOES use an arcane macro
language too (that manages to be less readable than the mixed M4+shell
script from Autoconf.) If you don't use it then you probably could be
using a Makefile directly. Of course, if a Makefile solves your problem,
there is no reason to switch to a more complicated solution.

I really wish there was something better than autotools, but for now
I'll take it over existing alternatives any day.

-- 
Daniel K. O.
"The only way to succeed is to build success yourself."