Re: Extensions to M4sh

[Demi Marie Obenour]

On 5/3/22 16:35, Zack Weinberg wrote:
> On Mon, May 2, 2022, at 2:30 AM, Paul Eggert wrote:
>> On 5/1/22 19:06, Alex Ameen wrote:
>>> Whoever is most
>>> actively working on M4sh would be an incredibly useful contact for me, so
>>> if "that's you" let me know.
>>
>> To be honest right now I think "that's you" is the correct answer. As 
>> in, you're the one.
> 
> I concur.  Right now it seems like nobody is actively working on anything in 
> Autoconf, so if you've got patches that makes you the most active contributor.
Honestly, I feel like the autotools are dying.

They solve a lot of problems people usually don’t have (support
for ancient proprietary Unixes, workarounds for broken systems) and
don’t solve problems people *do* have (reproducible builds, support
for Windows, dependency management, using a decent language for build
scripts, IDE integration).  And it is virtually impossible to improve
this situation, because it is a direct consequence of the autotools
working by generating shell scripts and makefiles.

If I use Meson or CMake, I get solutions to all of these problems,
except perhaps IDE integration.  And that is far more important to me
than being able to support Ultrix or IRIX.

A lot of projects have switched from the autotools to something else,
often CMake or Meson.  Very few have made the reverse switch.

If the autotools are to remain competitive, something needs to change.

-- 
Sincerely,
Demi Marie Obenour (she/her/hers)

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