Re: [ANNOUNCE] util-linux-ng 2.13-rc1

[Gerd Hoffmann <kraxel@redhat.com>]

Jeff Garzik wrote:
> Christoph Hellwig wrote:
>> And this is really dumb.  autotools is a completely pain in the ass and
>> not useful at all for linux-only tools.
> 
> A myth.  It is quite useful for packagers, because of the high Just
> Works(tm) factor.  After porting an entire across several revisions of a
> distro, the autotools-based packages are the ones that work out of the
> box 90% of the time.

And the 10% where it doesn't work it is a real pain to figure what goes
wrong due to the completely unreadable Makefiles generated by autotools.
 After all they are not Makefiles, they are shellscripts embedded into
Makefiles.

> The other 90% of _my_ time comes from annoying people who roll their own
> Makefile/build solution, which the packager has to then learn.

Well, it's not *that* hard to write makefiles which follow the usual
gnuish conventions, so stuff like "make DESTDIR=/tmp/buildroot install"
works just fine.  That isn't a reason to use autotools.  Especially as
people get that wrong *even with* autotools from time to time ...

cheers,

  Gerd