Re: Emacs vista build failures

[Johannes Weiner <hannes@saeurebad.de>]

Hi,

Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org> writes:

> Johannes Weiner <hannes@saeurebad.de> writes:
>> Which means using the auto tools, be realistic.  Who writes configure
>> scripts manually?
>
> I certainly have.
>
> It's not a difficult interface to implement.
>
> Doing so _manually_ (as a shell script or something) is not particularly
> hard if you have simple needs.  If you're using some other build tool,
> it should often be fairly straight-forward to use that tool with a thin
> layer on top to implement the GNU configure interface.

It would be cool to have shell libraries you could use for whipping your
own configure.  I.e. no m4 macros but powerful shell functions you can
just call.

That way you would install the `GNU build libs' (or whatever you would
like to call them) and upstream distributors ship a 20-liner of a
configure script that utilizes these libraries instead of having heaps
of source trees that ship a 12k lines configure script.

> AFAICS, it's more a failure of imagination than a technical issue.

Richard was right with me mixing up the coding standard with the
autotools.  I am sorry.

The problem seems to be that people, including me, associate common GNU
configuration/building mechanism with the autotools.  So if they get
pissed while using them (which is not unlikely, as we already know now),
they probably tend to use something completely different, just because
there is something else that promises working out of the box.

So the more realistic case is that people chose scons or something
instead of dropping autotools and writing their own configure script.

I build a lot of software myself and this is based on half-assed
observation, I might be wrong.

	Hannes