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Autotools is a pain for development. autoreconf is slow, configure is super slow, and the Makefile generated by automake is a monster that adds seconds just to
by hzhou321 6y ago
Autotools is a pain for development. autoreconf is slow, configure is super slow, and the Makefile generated by automake is a monster that adds seconds just to do a no-op make and it is impossible to hack. So for development, I simply hack up my own scripts to generate the config headers, directly parse the Makefile.am (which is surprisingly easy to parse) and generate my own Makefile. This works well because development only need a specific environment and a simplified Makefile. But I value autotools and keep maintaining the configure.ac, because it really saves you a lot of trouble in supporting users.
- flukus 6y agoConfigure and autoreconf may not be the fastest, but they aren't run frequently enough to really bother me. I'd have to disagree with the generated makefile being slow though, I still find it by far the fastest build system. I've done the whole custom makefiles as well, but by the time you have tests, installation, etc it just becomes a burden to maintain them.
- jnxx 6y agoI'd agree with that. If a build happens on a build server, it does hardly matter if it takes an extra minute. What matters for developing and debugging stuff are fast incremental builds. And for this, one just needs to type "make", as it is not needed to run configure again unless one changes to a different system.
- hzhou321 6y ago> I've done the whole custom makefiles as well, but by the time you have tests, installation, etc it just becomes a burden to maintain them. It is generated from the same `Makefile.am`, so no extra burden to maintain. It is just a simplified version of the Makefile. With my project, it is ~1000 lines vs ~44000 lines, so it does make a huge difference in its latency.