Re: afraid to build from source?
Peter Samuelson <peter@p12n.org> writes:
> [Goswin von Brederlow]
>> The big problem is that those autogenerated build scripts will be non
>> deterministic on the buildd network and on users system. Depending on
>> the installed packages (automake/autoconf versions) you get different
>> results and often failures. :(
>
> What low expectations we have. Why are we willing to tolerate this in
> autotools? We wouldn't tolerate it in other development tools like
> make. Reliable ability to build things seems to be a fairly basic
> property of a build tool.
Even make breaks from time to time. I distinctly remeber an update of
make that caused problems. There are also several gcc versions that
are quite different in their behaviour.
But unlike automake/autoconf we only have one version of make in the
archive and everything is fixed to work with it. We also only have one
gcc-x.y that is the default gcc with only a few exceptions and again
everything is fixed to work with that.
Somehow with automake/autoconf there have always been multiple
versions in the archive and nobody cared much for updating every
source package to the latest automake/autoconf. It probably is due to
the fact that you can change the source and build it without altering
the configure.in/Makefile.am/Makefile.in files in most cases.
MfG
Goswin
Reply to: