3 ms·
Has anyone tried developing a project to machine translate all these autoconf/etc configurations to something more modern like Meson that's been able to learn f
by treyd 3y ago
Has anyone tried developing a project to machine translate all these autoconf/etc configurations to something more modern like Meson that's been able to learn from past mistakes? Like obviously there's many hacks over the many years that wouldn't be digestible and able to be translated but surely it can be done on a best-effort basis.
- lmm 3y agoYes, these things have been done, but largely end up being abandoned. If the maintainer doesn't want to port to Meson or whatever your alternative is, they're pretty useless - your "best effort" port will break arbitrarily. If the maintainer does want to port to Meson, it's probably easier for them to write what the build should be from scratch than pull anything out of autoconf.
- radarsat1 3y agoThe way the build system imposes on a C/C++ project is just too much. I've maintained multiple projects now that have ended up supporting multiple build systems just because different people prefer different things. I always end up find myself wishing I could break off the build systems into separate projects so that other people could maintain them but that feels a bit silly. But honestly for a smallish C project you can easily end up spending more time on and having more LoC in the build system(s) than in the actual codebase, it's ridiculous.