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

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Fri, 16 Sep 2005, Ralf Corsepius wrote:

> On Wed, 2005-09-14 at 13:52 -0500, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> > 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?
> So far, scons is an exotic niche amongst other tools with almost no
> relevant history.

This is a huge factor which should be carefully considered.  Anything 
related to portability has a value which is measured based on actual 
experience.

> Exactly. No matter which solutions people might come up with, they will
> have to prove sustainability.
>
> No matter how imperfect current autotools are, I haven't seen any tool
> yet that comes close to the autotools ;)

It is not difficult to imagine that someone can invent something which 
is much slicker than autotools but package maintainers need to 
consider if they want their projects to be 'alpha' test-beds for 
unproven packages since the burden is on the package maintainer to 
make them work.

GNU autotools includes input from many thousands of users over many 
years.

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