Re: portability of xargs

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Tue, 15 Feb 2022, Paul Smith wrote:

> On Tue, 2022-02-15 at 15:37 -0600, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> > I have been told by several people (who have much more self-esteem
> > than me) that a build tool called 'cmake' is far more portable than
> > Autotools so maybe we should make support for 32 year old systems
> > cmake's responsibility?
>
> That is not accurate.  Or at least, cmake uses a much different
> definition of "portable" than autoconf / automake.  Certainly cmake
> cannot possibly support 32-year old systems (if that's needed).

Thanks for the nice response.  I did not for a minute think that 
what I was told was accurate.

The people who tell me it is more portable are very interested in 
targeting Microsoft Windows.

> cmake is a tool that, given an input definition of build dependencies,
> can generate build control files for multiple different types of build
> tools.  It can generate makefiles, Ninja files, Xcode project files,
> and Visual Studio project files.  Maybe others, I'm not sure.

The "Makefiles" that Cmake generates are self-referential in that 
almost all rules invoke Cmake to do the work.

> The main idea of autoconf is that it allows configuring the package for
> systems that the author never even heard of, much less has access to
> (as long as it has a POSIX interface).  cmake only tries to generate
> output files for systems it has been developed for (for example, each
> new version of Visual Studio often requires a new release of cmake to
> support it).

The above is a perfect description of the situation.

> Of course maybe autoconf is not necessary anymore: I don't know about
> that.  I do know that even though GNU make itself is relatively simple,

I find that the function of Autoconf is quite useful.  When compared 
with Cmake, it is much more user-friendly since the configure script 
responds to --help and the help output is very helpful.  The configure 
script nicely tells me what it is doing and what it found.  Autotools 
is very structured and projects work in a common way whereas I find 
that Cmake projects are heavily customized with options added by the 
project developer.  Just doing a build entirely outside of the source 
tree is extremely clumsy with Cmake.

Regardless, I don't think that Autotools developers should waste time 
on assuring compatability with systems which are no longer in active 
use.  It is much better so spend time improving areas where Autotools 
is weak.

If 'xargs' has worked consistently for 20 years, it should be ok to 
use.

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
Public Key,     http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/public-key.txt