Re: [chat] portable scripting

[Pete Ryland <pdr@xxxxxx>]

On Thu, Jan 30, 2003 at 08:33:16AM +1100, Conrad Parker wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 29, 2003 at 01:37:29PM +0000, Pete Ryland wrote:
> > Well, automake will still be useful, but autoconf?  Not necessary.  My
> 
> bollocks

:P

> autoconf can detect a crapload of problems with missing stuff and
> incorrect versioning to help diagnose build problems. the only problem
> is that most people lame out and do nothing but the one-line PKG_CHECK
> and then fail with a useless message like "eeeeek need gtk!!!" if it
> doesn't find everything where it wanted it.
> 
> so, yeah, if your configure is lame and makes no attempt to diagnose
> problems, you might as well not use it if you're building on an
> FHS compliant system; but that problem is nothing to do with autoconf.

Yeah, you're right, autoconf is useful.

But then I thought the whole point of having autoconf was to be able to be
lame and have it do all the work.  If I have to write 100 lines of
compatable sh to detect for example where various python bin/include/lib/...
directories are (and yes, I did this the other day - and taking into account
possible multiple versions is a pain), then I may as well just use a shell
script configure instead - why can it not do this for me?  I'm sure someone
else will need to detect these things someday too, and I'm not in any way
inclined towards the copy/paste school of computer engineering.

Maybe I'm wrong, or maybe I'm just whinging.  Or maybe I should just submit
more bug reports to them, although the last couple of times the replies I
got seemed to suggest that they thought their software was perfect and it
must be just me not using it correctly (this was about how the configure
macros only ever link implicitly (as in "gcc -o conftest conftest.c"), thus
not really testing if the toolchain that will get used even works fully).

Pete
-- 
Pete Ryland
http://pdr.cx/