BSD equivalents of autoconf, automake, etc.

[Conrad J. Sabatier]

On Thu, 18 Nov 2004 16:05:31 +0000, Jonathon McKitrick
<jcm at FreeBSD-uk.eu.org> wrote:

> 
> I'm starting to dabble in these self-contained self-building scripts
> and tools and so on, like automake, autoconf, libtool, and so on.
> 
> Are these the preferred way of doing things on FreeBSD, or is there a
> better or more BSD-way of doing them?
> 
> Some time ago, Terry Lambert suggested that tools such as imake were
> vastly superior, and that the GNU tools were just to compensate for
> the inconsistencies across Linux distros.

He's probably right.  :-)

> I'd like to learn something that makes sense to learn because it is
> practical, but at the same time, without sacrificing too much
> portability.
> 
> jm

The main problem with the GNU auto* tools is their inconsistency across
versions (which is why we still have several versions of each tool in
the ports collection; not because this is A Good Thing, but because
it's a necessity).  A program that will build just fine with one version
will generate errors or other problems with another version.  Most
annoying.

-- 
Conrad J. Sabatier <conrads at cox.net> -- "In Unix veritas"