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

[Peter Volkov Alexandrovich]

Thank you Bob for your answer.

On Срд, 2005-09-14 at 13:52 -0500, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> 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.

So. If I understand correctly, for it's natural to use autotools for
programs that use small number of "low" libraries, to keep small number
of dependencies. In contrast to this are desktop applications, that uses
as a dependency many libs (and thus python may be already installed, or
python installation is a small step in building of such application)
it's better to use something like scons. Right?

Thank you again. Now I know, that autotools will be supported for a long
time, as many programs will need the "lowest denominator" in near
future.

Peter.

signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part