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One thing however that the autotools do and i do not see any of the other supposedly replacements do is that from the users (be it an application user who wants

One thing however that the autotools do and i do not see any of the other supposedly replacements do is that from the users (be it an application user who wants to compile the code or a developer who wants to compile a library but does not have plans to develop it, so for all intents and purposes the are just a "user" of that library) is that it does not require autotools to be installed unless you want to modify the project structure itself (even simple code changes are most of the time fine without having autotools). It only requires a Make but that is basically a standard and available anywhere, unlike the other systems that they target (and cmake, etc, also need Make anyway). I always found that annoying because if i just want to compile something (be it a program or a library) from source, i also need to install a bunch of build systems i'm not going to ever use myself. That is just pure and unnecessary bloat for me.

jcranmer 6y ago
The flip side of this is that it means most projects come with an old version of autotools--and if you need to do something where "old" is equivalent to "broken", it becomes a wonderful world of pain. A specific example I ran into was compiling random projects with -flto. libtool, in its infinite wisdom, decided long ago that it was a bad idea to pass any -f flags to the linker invocation and so stripped them out, even if you the user manually told it to via LDFLAGS. This of course breaks -flto--so newer versions of libtool got the picture and whitelisted that flag. Except projects haven't updated libtool for a while, so you have to patch their source to get it to work.
- badsectoracula 6y ago
  AFAICT if you need to modify the build configuration -changing optimization levels is one such things since optimizations can potentially break applications- you are expected to install (and hence, update) autotools as if you were a developer of the program/library. But TBH my comment was more about the other build tools than autotools... Autotools have many issues and are way more complex than need to be, but i do not see a build tool that does exactly the same thing as autotools do, despite being so many tools out there.

jcranmer 6y ago

The flip side of this is that it means most projects come with an old version of autotools--and if you need to do something where "old" is equivalent to "broken", it becomes a wonderful world of pain. A specific example I ran into was compiling random projects with -flto. libtool, in its infinite wisdom, decided long ago that it was a bad idea to pass any -f flags to the linker invocation and so stripped them out, even if you the user manually told it to via LDFLAGS. This of course breaks -flto--so newer versions of libtool got the picture and whitelisted that flag. Except projects haven't updated libtool for a while, so you have to patch their source to get it to work.

badsectoracula 6y ago
AFAICT if you need to modify the build configuration -changing optimization levels is one such things since optimizations can potentially break applications- you are expected to install (and hence, update) autotools as if you were a developer of the program/library. But TBH my comment was more about the other build tools than autotools... Autotools have many issues and are way more complex than need to be, but i do not see a build tool that does exactly the same thing as autotools do, despite being so many tools out there.