You're right. It's not that autoconf never works, it's that it fails so
frequently that I can't trust it to work. Case in point, I just had a bunch
of trouble this morning with it, with the most trivial command, and had to
reset the repo to ground state to get it to build again.

but compared to my experience with Go, autoconf does not compare well.

On Thu, Jun 20, 2024 at 2:53 PM David Arnold <davida@pobox.com> wrote:

>
> > On 21 Jun 2024, at 07:00, ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > here's where I'd have to disagree: "./configure && make is not so bad,
> it's not irrational, sometimes it's overkill, but it works"
> >
> > because it doesn't. Work, that is. At least, for me.
>
> Never?
>
> Any tool can be misused (perhaps there’s an issue with slurm’s
> implementation here?)
>
> I think the quality of autoconf usage (by project authors) has declined,
> perhaps as building from source has been overtaken by the use of binary
> packages.
>
> I’d argue that autotools (incl automake and libtool) can be a decent
> solution in the hands of devs who care.  At one time, I think it was the
> best compromise, although I’m open to argument that this time has passed.
>
> It was certainly never useful for general portability to Windows, for
> instance, and more recent tools manage that better.
>
>
>
>
> d
>