Re: Recommendation for build environment(s)
amacater@galactic.demon.co.uk (Andrew M.A. Cater) writes:
> Possibly try to limit your make tools to GNU make or the
> GNUautoconf/automake [see below]
...
> All of the above are good but not as well known as make/automake.
Yeah, I'll second that. The autotools suite is in many ways pretty kludgey
implementation-wise, but as long as you don't try to force it to do
anything _too_ weird[*], it's very simple to use, and makes it easy to
follow general GNU guidelines for installation/packaging/building/etc with
minimal effort. Automake in particular takes care of _tons_ of drudge-work
for you -- it pretty much gets rid of all the boilerplate which people
associate with makefiles.
For a simple project, really all you need to do is list the source files
and final target binaries. Expanding to multiple directories, libraries,
etc. is very natural and simple as well.
If you want to make your system portable, autoconf makes it pretty simple
to do any necessary configuration testing, though it isn't quite as
drop-dead easy as automake. [For the first cut though, you really don't
need to use autoconf at all -- your "configure.ac" file can basically
specify the program name, a list of configured files (typically the
makefiles), a few lines saying things like "I'm using c++", and that's it.]
Of course there are a few things which automake really doesn't want to do,
and if you try to force it, you'll have a devil of a time. However I
suppose this is true of all build systems.
[*] "Just a little weird" is fine though, since you've (mostly) still got
the resources of make available, even if you usually don't use them
very much with automake. This ability to easily (in many cases)
"deviate slightly" from convention is also useful.
-Miles
--
Any man who is a triangle, has thee right, when in Cartesian Space, to
have angles, which when summed, come to know more, nor no less, than
nine score degrees, should he so wish. [TEMPLE OV THEE LEMUR]
Reply to: