"Russ Allbery" <rra@debian.org> wrote in message [🔎] 87mzfwhbpq.fsf@windlord.stanford.edu">news:[🔎] 87mzfwhbpq.fsf@windlord.stanford.edu...
Joe Smith <unknown_kev_cat@hotmail.com> writes:
So I must ask why do people dislike the autotools? Are there really problems that outweigh the benefits of being able to compile the program on strange architectures with little difficulty? Remember that the autotools let one compile the program in the same way on a GNU/Linux system, Cygwin, BSD, and a large number of commercial unixes.Er, well, kind of. The autotools are one valuable tool to write portable code. Using them definitely will not make your code portable to all of those platforms. If the program is non-trivial, you will probably still have to do some porting.
I did not mean to imply that no porting is never needed. However with fairly portable code and properly written configure.ac script very little porting should be nessisary. If the autoconf script is properly written, configure will search for the library to be included for each of the functions the program uses that does not have just one possible library.
It will also check that libraries that are needed are installed.In the case of functions that are somewhat non-standard, configure can search for other compatable functions from a list provided by the developer/maintainer. In that case the function used would be defined as a macro
that uses the compatable function instead.
-- Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>