Re: ok to use autogen to generate Makefile.in?... alternatives?

[Daniel Jacobowitz <drow at mvista dot com>]

On Fri, Apr 05, 2002 at 07:47:41PM -0800, Bruce Korb wrote:
> 
> Nathanael wrote:
> > OK, I'm getting some decent reasons not to use autogen.
> 
> OK, I'm getting curious to know what they are.
> I hope they are addressable.  OS/X is, as I know
> it is working there.
> 
> > I have also found it rather finicky, and the dependence
> > on guile does trouble me (since guile is rather finicky).
> 
> *sigh*  There was a long argument several years ago about
> what language should be used as the "extension" language.
> The ingrown cruft had to go, but Perl? Tcl? Guile won.
> I am interested in hearing any trouble reports.
> 
> Daniel wrote:
> > Nathanael, I don't think there's anything in there that you can't do
> > with even the limited set of SH that we consider portable!
> 
> That is true, until you decide you want to doc the standard
> targets and subdirectories, for example.  I'm sure they are
> both touring complete.  :-)  The issue is flexibility, adaptability
> and comprehensibility.  Just look at the "target_flags" usage
> and explain how that is "easy" in a shell script.  It can
> be done, I suppose.  I just think this way is cleaner.

Obviously it's possible; I dare say the subset of SH autoconf uses is
Turing complete.  I meant that it could be done without undo grossness,
though.

As with many other languages, it's possible to write readable shell
code.  I'm sure I wasn't the only one on this list who looked at that
autogen fragment and had no idea what it did.  The syntax looks
straightforward and fairly intuitive, but I'd still be much quicker to
grasp it in shell.

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz                           Carnegie Mellon University
MontaVista Software                         Debian GNU/Linux Developer