Re: Future plans for Autotools

[Paul Eggert]

On 1/21/21 8:01 AM, Zack Weinberg wrote:
> I know that
> at least one person has tried to write a set of GNU Make library files
> intended to replace it altogether, but I've never seen anyone *finish*
> that project.  I'd very much like to see someone give that another go.

GNU Emacs never used Automake but its developers eventually decided to 
require GNU Make. This has not proved to be a problem in practice, as 
GNU Make is ubiquitous, and Automake features not directly supported by 
GNU Make don't seem to be needed by Emacs builds.

One possible way forward is to have an Autoconf 2 that builds atop GNU 
Make, both as a partial replacement for Automake (which is what Emacs 
does already), and as a way to speed up and simplify configuration.  If 
'configure' were mostly a front end to a GNU Make invocation, it could 
run configuration probes in parallel which would certainly be a win for 
me. And perhaps configuration probes could be written in GNU Make rather 
than m4, which would also be a win because it'd be one less language to 
learn.  (Of course we could continue to support existing m4-based 
probes, run sequentially, as well as letting Automake do its thing for 
people who prefer Automake.)

Whatever way forward is chosen will surely need coordination with 
Gnulib, which has essentially taken over most of the low-level 
system-specific porting tasks that Autoconf used to have. When Emacs 
adopted Gnulib but did not want to use Automake, we had to hack on 
Gnulib to support that; bigger hacks to Gnulib will surely be needed to 
support any of the changes proposed here.