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Autotools was a perfectly reasonable way of solving 1993 problems with 1993 tools. Whether it still makes any sense in 2023 a different matter... Having said th
by Pinus 3y ago
Autotools was a perfectly reasonable way of solving 1993 problems with 1993 tools. Whether it still makes any sense in 2023 a different matter... Having said that, given the choice between a non-working autoconf build scheme, and a non-working cmake build scheme, I prefer the former, but that may just be me getting old and lazy. Obviously, a working setup of anything would be much preferrable, but that seems like hopeless case if one is using anything other than the most popular Linux distro at the moment...
- dig1 3y ago> Whether it still makes any sense in 2023 a different matter... IMHO, it still makes sense in 2023. Suppose you want to ship & build your program on the latest Ubuntu, OpenWRT, 5 year old NetBSD or whatever SunOS user might be running in his basement. In that case, Autotools is your only bet without you having to run all those OSes to test if your programs build correctly. If you scan through GitHub, most projects support only the "latest" whatever because modern build systems aren't capable of anything else without significant workarounds. And you get that for free with a few autoconf & automake expressions. They are not perfect, but the problem they are solving is nasty.