Re: configuring libltdl

[Russ Allbery]

Bob Friesenhahn <address@hidden> writes:

> The issues I mention are primarily philosophical and religious.  There
> is a subversive element of open source society that is willing to use
> Autoconf and Libtool, but not Automake.  The FreeType and libJPEG
> projects come to mind.

Yup, I'm in that category too.  Automake makes a bunch of assumptions
about how a package will be organized, requires one generate all of one's
Makefiles with configure (thus making the configure step and rerunning
config.status just painfully slow), works poorly with non-recursive make,
and generates incredibly ugly and unreadable Makefiles and compiler
output.

It does a lot of nice things too, but if you already have a build system
that works, switching to Automake doesn't really have a lot of
justification and has definite drawbacks.  libtool, on the other hand, is
pretty easy to just drop in to a regular Autoconf with hand-written
Makefiles environment (I've done so on several occasions).

> If AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE is used, then Automake must be installed in order to
> maintain the package, even if the dependent package uses JAM, GNU make,
> BSD make, Imake, or hand-coded traditional make.

This I'm not too worried about.  I generally have Automake around.  Just
as long as I don't have to use Automake for the package itself when I use
libtool, I think this is fine.

-- 
Russ Allbery (address@hidden)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>