[<prev] [next>] [<thread-prev] [thread-next>] [day] [month] [year] [list]
Message-ID: <468E04D3.6080002@redhat.com>
Date: Fri, 06 Jul 2007 11:01:07 +0200
From: Gerd Hoffmann <kraxel@...hat.com>
To: Jeff Garzik <jeff@...zik.org>
CC: Christoph Hellwig <hch@...radead.org>, Karel Zak <kzak@...hat.com>,
List util-linux-ng <util-linux-ng@...r.kernel.org>,
linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [ANNOUNCE] util-linux-ng 2.13-rc1
Jeff Garzik wrote:
> Christoph Hellwig wrote:
>> And this is really dumb. autotools is a completely pain in the ass and
>> not useful at all for linux-only tools.
>
> A myth. It is quite useful for packagers, because of the high Just
> Works(tm) factor. After porting an entire across several revisions of a
> distro, the autotools-based packages are the ones that work out of the
> box 90% of the time.
And the 10% where it doesn't work it is a real pain to figure what goes
wrong due to the completely unreadable Makefiles generated by autotools.
After all they are not Makefiles, they are shellscripts embedded into
Makefiles.
> The other 90% of _my_ time comes from annoying people who roll their own
> Makefile/build solution, which the packager has to then learn.
Well, it's not *that* hard to write makefiles which follow the usual
gnuish conventions, so stuff like "make DESTDIR=/tmp/buildroot install"
works just fine. That isn't a reason to use autotools. Especially as
people get that wrong *even with* autotools from time to time ...
cheers,
Gerd
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@...r.kernel.org
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
Powered by blists - more mailing lists