autotools hurts my brain; it's a monster out of control

Behdad Esfahbod behdad at behdad.org
Fri Dec 5 05:41:43 UTC 2008


Peter Jones wrote:
> Responding to the correct mailing list for this discussion.  Cc:ing the
> other one.
> 
> Ulrich Drepper wrote:
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>>
>> John Dennis wrote:
>>> I've had my fill of autotool problems (especially libtool)
>>
>> Don't throw in libtool with the rest.  libtool was available in the
>> spirit of the auto tools only in its very first version (which of those
>> reading this only Jim and Tom will know).  Then came the windows and
>> HP-SUX idiots and ruined it.  I've for the longest time said libtool
>> should not be used (and I don't do it in my code).  In the worst case a
>> simple Linux-only replacement for libtool should be used.
> 
> I agree that a Linux-only replacement for libtool should be used, if at
> all.  So why isn't there one available in Fedora that deps on "libtool"
> will pick by default?

There's one, called dolt.  Problem is, packages ship with generated files so
they won't pick it up unless you want to do the 'autoconf; libtoolize;
automake; ...' at build time, which breaks more stuff than it fixes.  dolt is
not fully transparent.  One needs to add one line to configure.ac, but that
can be worked around if we wanted to.

behdad




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