Re: Autoconf/Automake

[Jerome Lovy <rqe28bj3vfyi4eo@jetable.net>]

Olivier Galibert wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 15, 2006 at 10:02:10AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
>>These days, there aren't fifteen different versions of UNIX. There's a 
>>couple, and it's perfectly ok to actually say "fix your damn system and 
>>just install GNU make". It's easier to install GNU make than it is to 
>>install autoconf/automake.
> 
> 
> You should be careful to separate autoconf and automake.  Autoconf is
> not so bad, and you can make clean, maintainable Makefile.in and
> config.h.in files with it, because it uses simple substitution.  It is
> quite useful to detect available librairies when some are optional,
> and also to lightly[1] ensure that prefix and friends will stay the
> same between make and make install.  Also, especially if you hack a
> little bit to alias 'enable' and 'with', you get a sane interface to
> optional feature selection.  Oh, and to seperate compilation
> directories too (vpath generation).

I fully agree with Olivier. It seems to me that you don't have to buy 
the whole autoconf/automake/libtool stack to leverage the autoconf 
functionality. autoconf alone provides the full "autoconfiguration" 
framework (running scriptlets and setting substitution variables 
accordingly). You still have to write Makefile.in (with statements 
looking like: CC=@CC@). Therefore the resulting Makefile is just as 
beautiful or as ugly as you wrote the initial Makefile.in: you have full 
control over it.

As for dependencies, one shouldn't confuse what is needed on the 
autoconfiguration developer's side (in order to build the configure 
script from the configure.in file) and what is needed on the installer's 
side to run the configure script and process the generated makefile. The 
former needs the autoconf package which itself relies on GNU m4. The 
latter merely needs a decently compatible Bourne shell and a decently 
compatible make.

On the other hand, what you get with automake is a fully automatically 
generated makefile, with make targets conforming to the GNU standards. 
But then you fully loose control over the Makefile: you don't write the 
Makefile.in anymore (automake does it for you) but rather the terce 
Makefile.am. In this respect, automake is like imake: you write few 
lines of (i)makefile, but then you cannot complain if you don't 
understand what comes in the generated makefile ;-) .

Jérôme Lovy