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"make it work with the autotools" ? The auto* family of tools have a ton of complexity to make things work with non-GNU tools. Automake would be vastly simpler
by yosh 17y ago
"make it work with the autotools" ? The auto* family of tools have a ton of complexity to make things work with non-GNU tools. Automake would be vastly simpler if there wasn't the specific design goal of working with non-GNU make.
- silentbicycle 17y agoThat didn't come out right - I meant that sometimes people get the impression that make is incredibly complex because they look at makefiles generated by the autotools. Those makefiles are typically very different from hand-written ones.
- yosh 17y agoThose makefiles wouldn't have to be as complex if automake only targeted GNU make. A lot of the messiness is there to support conditionals.
- silentbicycle 17y agoThat's because conditionals are implicit in the underlying selection of targets. Trying to force explicit conditionals into the language gets cumbersome and ugly. You don't see explicit 'if's in Prolog, either.
- yosh 17y agoI disagree. Writing multiplatform makefiles without explicit conditionals is cumbersome and ugly, mainly because the problem space contains so many exceptions. In this case, purism isn't really practical.