[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] why autotools?

[From: Kalle Vahlman]

2005/9/24, Asko Kauppi <askok at dnainternet.net>:
>
> The Maemo system, examples and all, build heavily on use of
> autotools.  Now, in my opinion the sole use of that toolchain is to
> cover multiple *nixes in a somewhat controllable fashion.

That would be an oversimplification. Using autotools allows also
dependancy checking and automates not only platform specific options,
but also compile-time options of different parts of the program.
Granted, this can be done with just makefiles, but you'd need to
create by hand the structure autotools already has.

> The question is: why does a Maemo-only hello world use autotools,
> since there's clearly no benefit per se from having that "have this
> have that" analysis done?

I'd guess it's for dependancies. I don't see a big downside to it either?

--
Kalle Vahlman, zuh at iki.fi
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