From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: bakul@bitblocks.com (Bakul Shah) Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2017 13:41:23 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] Tools and building: libtool, autoconf, etc. [ trying to have a relevant subject line ] In-Reply-To: <201709142022.v8EKMqf8001876@darkstar.fourwinds.com> References: <201709121535.v8CFZOuB015695@darkstar.fourwinds.com> <20170913022333.GD24549@mcvoy.com> <201709141111.v8EBBnXm021044@freefriends.org> <20170914132146.KCMCk%steffen@sdaoden.eu> <201709141944.v8EJisAw010768@freefriends.org> <201709142022.v8EKMqf8001876@darkstar.fourwinds.com> Message-ID: On Sep 14, 2017, at 1:22 PM, Jon Steinhart wrote: > > I don't have much love for the libtool/autoconf/automake/etc. system. > While it works, and is better than nothing, I have always felt that > it was the wrong approach. I am fortunate that I know some of the > folks who worked on these tools because they're part of the too complex > for casual users thing that I mentioned in my earlier post about open > source. My days of wrestling with libtool/autoconf/automake/cmake are mostly in the past. On FreeBSD/MacOS I use pkg/brew. For any new coding I mainly use Go. Even cross compiled binaries just work. It has a very well engineered ecosystem. > There are two big advantages to handling portability this way. First, the > source code is easier to read; it's not full of #ifdef this and #ifndef that. > Second, once the portability library existed it just worked and could be > reused. With the GNU tools methodology, every time someone needed to do a > fopen on a machine where the target behaved differently, the alternate code > needed to be written. There was no debugged library where this stuff only > had to be figured out once. I agree with this. auto{conf,make}/configure is just the wrong approach. At Real Networks our media server ran on 12 or so Unix platforms + windows + macOS9 (at the time). I managed to corral machine dependent code in basically a couple files for all but MacOS9. No #ifdefs in any other file. C++ also helped to hide things like select(2) vs poll(2) from other code.