Re: autoconf: Does it meet these cross-platform goals?

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hi Matt, Ed,

* Ed Hartnett wrote on Tue, Apr 04, 2006 at 01:58:39PM CEST:
> Matt England <address@hidden> writes:
> >
> > I'm managing a newly-open-sourced project, and I'm looking to
> > accomplish these goals:
> >
> > 1) Ensure the source packages can build on all systems
> 
> *All* systems? Really? How about my HP calculator? 

Yes, even that HP calculator.  I've been meaning to buy a connection set
for mine, and translation software eventually.  At one point I realized
someone had already done gotten the linpack test working there..

> How about my TRS-80 from 25 years ago?

Most software won't fit in that little memory.  For example, a typical
shell necessary to execute a configure script.  :-)

*snip*
> The autotools way is hard at first but scales very well.

There are some known scaling issues that come with the autotools, when
used on typical larger software projects.  For example, the size of a
typical generated configure script, the size of all Makefiles and
Makefile.in's combined, the configure time overhead, the libtool script
time overhead.

Long-term, let's hope that all of them can be fixed.  I believe the
first, second and last of them can be fixed under reasonable
assumptions, as there are specific albeit not short-term plans for them.

There are more issues on oldish systems: for example, some shells handle
here documents very badly (link-farming on every fork) and will seem to
literally take forever to execute configure (or even more, autotest)
scripts (I think that's why, on AIX, bash should be greatly preferred
to /bin/sh as CONFIG_SHELL).

Cheers,
Ralf