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Re: Tired of make. Anyone interested in a guile-based replacement?
Date: Thu, 3 Jun 1999 15:53:04 -0700 (PDT)
From: Michael Vanier <mvanier@bbb.caltech.edu>
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Clifford Beshers <beshers@cs.columbia.edu> writes:
> I tried using automake and found it impossible. It's nice when you
> get a package and say configure ; make and it works, but writing the
> thing yourself is a nightmare. It's all macros defined heaven knows
> where.
FWIW I recently finished configuring a software package with autoconf and
autoheader (not automake, but I'll probably use that eventually). It was
my first time using autoconf/autoheader. It's not all that bad after you
get the hang of it; I learned it from the GNU info docs. I'd *definitely*
suggest leaving out automake until you've first gotten autoconf and
autoheader to work. Or perhaps you already have?
I abandoned the whole thing long ago as the spawn of the devil. :-)
Seriously, though, that's how it made me feel. It was great at first,
but any time I tried to do something non-standard, I was faced with
random errors, incomplete documentation, bugs, and impenetrable source
code.
I really didn't like the philosophy of the whole thing. It was all ad
hoc names, like a bad AI program.
I think having a real programming language would lead to a more open
and comprehensible structure. Given that, then all of the carefully
collected rules of autoconf and automake could be imported. Those
rules work just fine, and they should certainly not be discarded
completely, but I think they are too monolithic and need to be
reorganized into a series of manageable transformations.
At the very least, they were impenetrable to me as a developer,
causing frustration instead of easing it.
Cliff
--
Clifford Beshers Computer Graphics and User Interfaces Lab
beshers@cs.columbia.edu Department of Computer Science
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~beshers Columbia University