An autoconf bikeshed

Matthias Andree matthias.andree at gmx.de
Sat May 6 17:06:38 UTC 2006


Pav Lucistnik <pav at freebsd.org> writes:

> One major drawback of using autotools is that every distfile grows about
> 250 kB of repeated code. With modular X, that's a lot of bytes to
> transfer.

Unless you make automake, autoconf and the rat's tail of requirements
requistes and stop shipping the repetitive "configure" and "Makefile.in"
bloat - essentially this still wants to work on every trash shell. I'd
rather see autoconf 3 use shell functions even if that impairs
portability.

It's not like developers (all my projects like bogofilter, fetchmail,
leafnode use autoconf and automake) were very fond of the bloat that
auto* entails, but it's a standardized way, easy to customize at
configure or install time and porters are rather well-acquainted with it.

> As for developers use, I'd say much more people today are familiar with
> autotools then with imake. Imake is a dying beast. Going with mainstream
> is always good to get more people involved.

How true.

-- 
Matthias Andree


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