(no subject)

[noahgibbs]

In discussing AutoConf and AutoMake, there are phrases that come to mind. For instance, "Evil! Evil! Evil!".

Anybody know if the O'Reilly book on them is any good, particularly for relatively casual users of them?

By "relatively casual", I mean "I want to do as little as possible with autoconf and automake while still getting my app to build on a variety of platforms."

I'm aware of the section on them in GTK+/GNOME Application Development. It's my current primary reference material on the subject. It's not great, but it beats the actual manuals for them...

Comments

[ts4z.livejournal.com]

Bah! I learned to write autoconf scrips before we had manuals!

The less you use, the less you'll have to learn, I guess. The GNU autoconf manual had a trivial script to get started. Beyond that, you can restrict yourself to a few macros. The macro index in the GNU manual is very useful. This is enough to get by with classic X apps, far superior to imake. Biting off automake complicates things somewhat; I would start with autoconf, which can be held to a trivial addition to a program.

However, because the Linux distributions vary so wildly, if you can use the really overbuilt config tools, time spent figuring them out will be worth it.

It helps if you look at it as an adversarial programming environment, in which the maintainers are actively trying to fuck with you, but still get you to buy their products.

Let me know if I can help. What are you working on? (feel free to send plain old email.)

[xarnix.livejournal.com]

I would just like to add to the "Evil! Evil! Evil!" by pointing out that some of the GNU tools contain files called "configure.in" that are in fact not used by autoconf, and are a completely different beast. Personally, I think they did this just to annoy.

Last time I looked, autoconf was the worst of the lot, except for all the other ones.

[xthread.livejournal.com]

I view autoconf much like I view Frys Electronics: If the answer to the question is 'just use autoconf,' then it was a stupid question.

On a more serious note, I think you should carefully consider your decision to use autoconf. How many platforms are you *really* going to have to build on? How much platform specific code does your app really have? Autoconf is basically a glorified hack that centralizes all of the accumulated knowledge of how to individually #ifdef your code, stealing liberally from Larry Wall's configure utility. If your code doesn't actually need to do very much to that's platform specific, then don't bother to use autoconf, because you don't need to.

And if you look at this problem long and hard, and conclude that large chunks of your app really are platform-specific, and that those functions are so richly marbled throughout the app that they can't be cordoned off into a small platform-specific library with its very own evil build logic, then I have just three words for you.

You Poor Bastard.

Happy coding...