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This reminds me of the Autotools duality: most developers hate autotools because of its unnecessary complexity but users (ie. those who want to compile the sour
by Crinus 7y ago
This reminds me of the Autotools duality: most developers hate autotools because of its unnecessary complexity but users (ie. those who want to compile the source) like it because of its flexibility (most autotool-based projects build pretty much on anything that smells like Unix), configurability and use of standard tools (shell, make) that are already installed (pretty much every other build system - like cmake, premake, meson, scons, etc - need itself installed on the user's system).
So you get developers hating it and users (especially admins and distro packagers) loving it (well, packagers who have to build a lot of stuff sometimes dislike the performance).
- AstralStorm 7y agoUnfortunately, there's not just one autotools but at least two major variants: libtool and direct, with 3 common incompatible versions in the wild: 2.1, 2.6, 2.13. Packagers have some trouble getting fixes to these build systems to stick. Cue Gentoo autotools.eclass with automatic application of generic set of fixes for all the brokenness of the ages.
- Crinus 7y agoAFAIK this is a problem only if you want to regenerate the configure scripts. As a "user" (and packager) you should use the pregenerated configure script provided in the release.