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The burning question is: is Autotools worth it these days? In my early days of programming, I thought Autotools was the coolest thing in the whole world. It

The burning question is: is Autotools worth it these days? In my early days of programming, I thought Autotools was the coolest thing in the whole world. It was essentially magic. These days, with the demand for running on non-Linux UNIX at an all time low, why put yourself through all this?

aparsons 6y ago
For most programming (ie - web services), no. For anything that makes system calls within 1-2 layers of abstraction (graphics programming, shell utilities, etc) it is a godsend
maxlybbert 6y ago
I would be willing to spend an incredible effort to keep something POSIX instead of using autotools ( https://varnish-cache.org/docs/2.1/phk/autocrap.html https://varnish-cache.org/docs/2.1/phk/autocrap.html ). They may have been an acceptable solution to a problem before the turn of the century, but things have changed enough that I’m not convinced they’re still delivering much bang for the buck.
- wahern 6y ago
  And yet Varnish is still using not only autoconf, but also automake. I've never had the need for automake, but autoconf feature tests are still useful. Not because of POSIX compat headaches, but because of the steady addition of new interfaces and the reimplementation of old ones. musl libc hadn't even made its initial release when the above tirade was written, yet there's a good chance Varnish built against musl because of those autoconf feature tests. This comes from someone who has invested a significant amount of time trying to implement pretty much exactly what PHK is advocating: https://github.com/wahern/autoguess https://github.com/wahern/autoguess I don't reach out for autoconf reflexively, but I fully appreciate why people do make use of it.
jnxx 6y ago
Apart from that the embedded universe needs to support a lot of CPU architectures, the demand for building on different hardware and slightly different library interfaces is unlikely to disappear. Just think in desktop apps using Qt4 / Qt5 or libraries which require CUDA support for different kinds of hardware.

aparsons 6y ago

For most programming (ie - web services), no. For anything that makes system calls within 1-2 layers of abstraction (graphics programming, shell utilities, etc) it is a godsend

maxlybbert 6y ago

I would be willing to spend an incredible effort to keep something POSIX instead of using autotools ( https://varnish-cache.org/docs/2.1/phk/autocrap.html https://varnish-cache.org/docs/2.1/phk/autocrap.html ). They may have been an acceptable solution to a problem before the turn of the century, but things have changed enough that I’m not convinced they’re still delivering much bang for the buck.

wahern 6y ago
And yet Varnish is still using not only autoconf, but also automake. I've never had the need for automake, but autoconf feature tests are still useful. Not because of POSIX compat headaches, but because of the steady addition of new interfaces and the reimplementation of old ones. musl libc hadn't even made its initial release when the above tirade was written, yet there's a good chance Varnish built against musl because of those autoconf feature tests. This comes from someone who has invested a significant amount of time trying to implement pretty much exactly what PHK is advocating: https://github.com/wahern/autoguess https://github.com/wahern/autoguess I don't reach out for autoconf reflexively, but I fully appreciate why people do make use of it.

jnxx 6y ago

Apart from that the embedded universe needs to support a lot of CPU architectures, the demand for building on different hardware and slightly different library interfaces is unlikely to disappear. Just think in desktop apps using Qt4 / Qt5 or libraries which require CUDA support for different kinds of hardware.