It's also kind of amazing how terrible most of the replacements people developed are. Some are significntly worse than autotools, which is no mean feat.
I hate using autotools, but every time I touch a project that uses something else (and that is too complex for a ten-line Makefile), I inevitably end up wishing that it used autotools. I suppose it shows that sometimes a few decades of polishing a turd does sort of work.
Yes! But I'm not so sure we can entirely blame the make syntax. Something made the CMake people believe that inventing a new macro language / m4-redux was a good idea. I'm thinking that either m4 is a mind-virus or they're serving wine in lead glasses at the annual build-system conferences.
I don't know about this. Back in 2003 I got all spun up on scons, and later working at Google and their Build system which was pretty amazing in what it could do. At the same time I discovered that you can't run Windows software, PC hardware, and a Windows OS that are skewed by more than a few years (seriously true for games, less true for productivity apps). And yet I can download thttpd and type 'make' in the directory and it just builds.
I've concluded that you can either embrace highly complex evolving systems and build tools which follow that evolution in such a way as to provide functions. Or you can make "point in time" sorts of things that are ephemeral in their ability to do what they do. Not a good choice but the only two that seem to be durable.
I completely agree that it is a challenging place to be.
brigade|12 years ago
I blame make's awful syntax.
plorkyeran|12 years ago
I hate using autotools, but every time I touch a project that uses something else (and that is too complex for a ten-line Makefile), I inevitably end up wishing that it used autotools. I suppose it shows that sometimes a few decades of polishing a turd does sort of work.
jjoonathan|12 years ago
mansr|12 years ago
ChuckMcM|12 years ago
I've concluded that you can either embrace highly complex evolving systems and build tools which follow that evolution in such a way as to provide functions. Or you can make "point in time" sorts of things that are ephemeral in their ability to do what they do. Not a good choice but the only two that seem to be durable.
I completely agree that it is a challenging place to be.