Re: kde moves to scons. The future of autotools?

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Wed, 14 Sep 2005, Peter Volkov Alexandrovich wrote:
> The aim of scons is to replace gnu build system, but what are the weak
> sides of gnu build system? Yes I know it's rather complex and do not use
> md5sum to check for changed files but autotools is time-tested solution.
> Could scons replace ./configure, that is standart de facto?

The biggest weakness of the GNU build system (as well as one of its 
major strengths) is that it makes no assumptions about the 
installation environment.  Rather than assuming/reqiring that certain 
non-standard tools are available, the GNU build system is designed to 
work with only the lowest common denominator standard utilities.

As a result, packages using the GNU build system can be installed on 
almost any machine which offers the basic prerequisites like a C 
compiler.  The GNU build system is very reliable and extremely mature 
due to many years of use and strong support.

The drawback is that due to the use of relatively crude tools like sh, 
sed, awk, and make, the GNU system is more complex, larger, and more 
difficult to maintain.  If the GNU system could rely on an evironment 
like Python, Perl, or Ruby being pre-installed, then it could be much 
smaller, faster, and easier to maintain.

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/