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Re: autogen?




On 9 Dec 1998, Jim Blandy wrote:

> 
> I've been fiddling around a bit with the GTK+ and GLIB trees, and at a
> first glance, I like the way they handle rebuilding Makefile.in,
> configure, and such with an `autogen.sh' script.
> 
> How would folks feel about switching Guile to this system?  Among
> folks who have used both Guile's way and GTK+'s way, which do you
> prefer?

... snip ...

> The disadvantage is:
> - Building from CVS or a snapshot would now require autoconf, automake, 
>   and libtool, in addition to GCC and GNU Make, since the files they
>   generate would no longer be provided in the repository.

plus frequently having the auto* macros fail to expand.  I don't know if
it's the CVS sources, or the machines I work on, but I've spent many hours
fighting with automake, autoconf, etc.  This has been on a 5 or 6
different machines (all using RedHat of some parentage - though pretty
hacked up in a couple cases).

75% of the time I get a good Makefile right off.  The rest of the time
something leaves something like "AM_CONFIG_HEADER(config.h)" sitting in
the configure script and/or lots of "%MAKE%" and "%LIBTOOL%" problems in
the Makefile.  It can easily take an hour to get make to run.

Of course, if anyone has figured those problems out, I'd be glad to hear a
solution.  And at least I generally know what I'm up against with them.
I'd rather deal with the above anyday rather than the horrors of "cp
Makefile.linux Makefile".  Still, getting a working ./configure script
seems to be the big hurdle, and having one already generated makes the CVS
guile much nicer to build than, say, gnome or enlightenment.

autogen.sh is really nice when it works, but when it doesn't work you're
screwed. Kind of like plug and play for software.

just my $.02

Erik

(yes, I'm a pessimist)