Re: Remove cdrtools
Wouter Verhelst writes:
> On Mon, Aug 14, 2006 at 10:58:13AM -0500, Steve Greenland wrote:
>> On 12-Aug-06, 09:09 (CDT), Jon Dowland <lists@alcopop.org> wrote:
>> > At 1155391794 past the epoch, Bernd Schubert wrote:
>> > > Btw, why always the autotools while there's this nice
>> > > cmake?
>> >
>> > I've never used cmake myself, so I can't speak for how nice
>> > it is, but autotools (for all its problems) is very
>> > widespread.
>>
>> So is syphilis. That doesn't make it desirable.
>
> Syphilis is a disease. Software usually isn't.
>
> In the case of autotools, the fact is that usually it's configure.ac or
> Makefile.am being horribly broken, rather than the autotools.
In my experience, this is greatly exacerbated and perhaps even
primarily due to older versions of autotools encouraging or requiring
behavior that later versions of autotools declare to be broken.
automake is the persistent offender here -- conditionally compiled
source files is a good example, where automake-1.5's info pages said
to do it one way, 1.6 said to do it another way (and complained if you
did it the 1.5 way), and IIRC 1.7+ prefer yet another way and broke
the 1.5 way of doing things.
autoconf has had some similar cases, such as the help string for
AC_ARG_WITH -- which is used by a large majority of autotooled
programs -- being one way for <2.59 but wanting AS_HELP_STRING in
2.59. Unfortunately, the old way produces goofy formatting (and maybe
a warning; I forget exactly) under 2.59.
The situation is not helped when these mutually incompatible programs
all prefer to be called "automake" or "autoconf" and, on less helpful
distributions, do not install themselves as automake-1.9 (etc).
Michael Poole
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