From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Gerd Hoffmann Subject: Re: [ANNOUNCE] util-linux-ng 2.13-rc1 Date: Fri, 06 Jul 2007 11:01:07 +0200 Message-ID: <468E04D3.6080002@redhat.com> References: <20070703221156.GY14825@petra.dvoda.cz> <20070704084211.GA19128@infradead.org> <468D78BE.4030902@garzik.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: Christoph Hellwig , Karel Zak , List util-linux-ng , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org To: Jeff Garzik Return-path: Received: from mx1.redhat.com ([66.187.233.31]:41997 "EHLO mx1.redhat.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1757739AbXGFJBT (ORCPT ); Fri, 6 Jul 2007 05:01:19 -0400 In-Reply-To: <468D78BE.4030902@garzik.org> Sender: linux-fsdevel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-fsdevel.vger.kernel.org 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