5 ms·

It's unfortunate that most programmers only experience with make is automake/autoconf. This is fantastic.

by bsdpufferfish 3y ago

NelsonMinar 3y ago
Autoconf, that's the thing that spends time making sure that my software can be built on BeOS and A/UX?
- asveikau 3y ago
  More like some obscure pre-c89 stuff. But it takes actual work and testing to get that working, so most people have a configure script that checks for all that stuff but when it's time to compile it only actually works on their specific Linux distro.
- im3w1l 3y ago
  I have a vivid memory of autoconf. I set it up best as I could. Someone ran ./configure. It triggered a new run of autoconf that failed because of mismatching autoconf version. Why it triggered a new run? Because of mtime checks. Why did they say it needed to be rerun? Because git doesn't preserve mtime. I guess it's just assumed that everyone distributes their sources as a tarball. I spent many hours trying to figure out how to bypass those issues, and I can't remember if I ever succeeded. These days I just use Rust instead.
  - dgfitz 3y ago
    > I spent many hours trying to figure out how to bypass those issues, and I can't remember if I ever succeeded. Might I suggest “got-restore-mtime” for this, upstream in Debian and Ubuntu already. Did you really spend hours on this?
    - e12e 3y ago
      This? https://manpages.org/git-restore-mtime https://manpages.org/git-restore-mtime
      - dgfitz 3y ago
        Sure. Are you trying to imply the existence of a manpage means something ubiquitous?
        e12e 3y ago
        I was wondering if “got-restore-mtime" was a typo or a cleverly named similar project to “git-restore-mtime".
    - im3w1l 3y ago
      Well I wanted to create an easy and familiar process for people installing from source, so I wanted it to be roughly git pull && ./configure && make && sudo make install. So I didn't consider restoring mtimes into that flow, just looked for options for autoconf to not regen. Also I think it took quite a while to even realize the mtimes were the issue from an error messages, as I was not very knowledgeable about autoconf / automake.
- bufio 3y ago
  autoconf's principal purpose is to waste time.

It's unfortunate that most programmers only experience with make is automake/autoconf. This is fantastic.

NelsonMinar 3y ago

Autoconf, that's the thing that spends time making sure that my software can be built on BeOS and A/UX?

asveikau 3y ago
More like some obscure pre-c89 stuff. But it takes actual work and testing to get that working, so most people have a configure script that checks for all that stuff but when it's time to compile it only actually works on their specific Linux distro.
im3w1l 3y ago
I have a vivid memory of autoconf. I set it up best as I could. Someone ran ./configure. It triggered a new run of autoconf that failed because of mismatching autoconf version. Why it triggered a new run? Because of mtime checks. Why did they say it needed to be rerun? Because git doesn't preserve mtime. I guess it's just assumed that everyone distributes their sources as a tarball. I spent many hours trying to figure out how to bypass those issues, and I can't remember if I ever succeeded. These days I just use Rust instead.
- dgfitz 3y ago
  > I spent many hours trying to figure out how to bypass those issues, and I can't remember if I ever succeeded. Might I suggest “got-restore-mtime” for this, upstream in Debian and Ubuntu already. Did you really spend hours on this?
  - e12e 3y ago
    This? https://manpages.org/git-restore-mtime https://manpages.org/git-restore-mtime
    - dgfitz 3y ago
      Sure. Are you trying to imply the existence of a manpage means something ubiquitous?
      - e12e 3y ago
        I was wondering if “got-restore-mtime" was a typo or a cleverly named similar project to “git-restore-mtime".
  - im3w1l 3y ago
    Well I wanted to create an easy and familiar process for people installing from source, so I wanted it to be roughly git pull && ./configure && make && sudo make install. So I didn't consider restoring mtimes into that flow, just looked for options for autoconf to not regen. Also I think it took quite a while to even realize the mtimes were the issue from an error messages, as I was not very knowledgeable about autoconf / automake.
bufio 3y ago
autoconf's principal purpose is to waste time.