From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Date: Thu,  3 May 2007 13:39:59 +1000
From: Adrian Tritschler <ajft@ajft.org>
Subject: Re: [9fans] speaking of kenc
In-reply-to: <30901.1178155962@d.0x1.org>
To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
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David Arnold <davida@pobox.com> writes:

> -->"Steve" == Steve Simon <steve@quintile.net> writes:
>
>   Steve> How we can sidestep autohell?
>
> autohell is now a 3-headed beast: automake, autoconf and libtool,
> where some of those are actually multiple components.

Does any of this really *help* with the business of getting arbitrary
software to compile?  The few times I've ever looked into the mess of
(what seems to me) endlessly circular dependencies of tools and scripts
and configuration files it seems that most of the config. stuff is busy
fighting *against* auto-blah and trying to simply tell a Makefile where
to find something.

> automake is PERL thing that takes a "simplified" Makefile.am, and
> emits a Makefile.in.  its added value is understanding how to drive
> libtool, and the creation of Makefiles with standard targets.
>
> autoconf is a Bourne-ish Shell script and a suite of m4 macros.  it
> processes various m4 *.in files to produce (at minimum) a Bourne Shell
> configure script, and a set of Makefiles.  its added value is
> two-fold: a series of HAVE_FOO macros used to compile different code
> fragments, and various other variables substituted into the Makefiles
> to actually compile and link different files.
>
> libtool is another Bourne-ish Shell script that encodes knowledge of
> how shared libraries are built using different linker and
> runtime-linker variants.
>
> i suspect that they probably require bash, GNU m4 and GNU sed.
> automake needs PERL.

...each one of which probably needs autoconf, automake and libtool to
build.

> those porting Python, etc, must have dealt with this somehow?

Whiskey?

> d
  Adrian