I agree that autocrap is the worst build system in use now. However writing plain Makefiles is not an option for projects that are more complex than hello world. It is very difficult to write them portably (between various OSes, compilers and make implementations) and to support cross compiling. That’s why developers used to write configure scripts that evolved to autocrap.
Happily we have better alternatives like cmake and meson (I personally prefer cmake and don’t like meson, but it is also a good build system solving the complexity problem).
Agreed. One flaw of autotools imho is that writes the configure script in sh. The rational was that the target system might not have other stuff installed.
However, it resulted in a machine-generated (very complex) shell script often without any comment. People also modify the generated shell script itself, because it’s committed in the project’s git repository. This is one reason why the problem explained in this blog got unnoticed.
I agree that autocrap is the worst build system in use now. However writing plain
Makefiles is not an option for projects that are more complex than hello world. It is very difficult to write them portably (between various OSes, compilers andmakeimplementations) and to support cross compiling. That’s why developers used to writeconfigurescripts that evolved to autocrap.Happily we have better alternatives like
cmakeandmeson(I personally prefercmakeand don’t likemeson, but it is also a good build system solving the complexity problem).Agreed. One flaw of autotools imho is that writes the configure script in sh. The rational was that the target system might not have other stuff installed.
However, it resulted in a machine-generated (very complex) shell script often without any comment. People also modify the generated shell script itself, because it’s committed in the project’s git repository. This is one reason why the problem explained in this blog got unnoticed.