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

[From: Gustavo Barbieri]

On 9/25/05, Timo Savola <tsavola at movial.fi> wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 25, 2005 at 04:41:16PM -0300, Gustavo Barbieri wrote:
> > On 9/25/05, Asko Kauppi <askok at dnainternet.net> wrote:
> > >
> > > Scons can do the compile-time-dependency checks quite nicely, but
> > > admitted, it's a different way of thinkin' altogether (build scripts
> > > are all Python).  Anyhow, the reasoning you guys are giving is
> > > meaningful, although I still think use of autotools is slowing down
> > > package creation unnecessarily. Good points, tho.
> > >
> > > btw, One neat thing I especially value in Scons is the way it
> > > considers changes in compilation flags as a trigger for
> > > recompilation. That is, it's much more clever than regular make, and
> > > essentially takes away the need to 'make clean' every so often.
> >
> > I'm a SCons lover too, but I must admit it lacks a big library test as
> > autotools have, things like test for gtk, sdl, alsa, ... must be coded
> > by hand (however there are examples on scons.org/ wiki).
>
> Autoconf's library tests can also be seen as a bad thing; my experience
> is that autoconf often does unnecessary and slow tests.  Configuration
> can be a significant part of the build time of a small package.  Also, at
> least I haven't figured out a way to skip the C-compiler and C-library
> related tests when building a C++ application that uses neither.
>
> While SCons is more advanced that make, it is still more of a low-level
> tool than the autotools are.  There should be a layer on top of SCons
> that fills the gap: for example, interfacing with pkg-config.

http://www.scons.org/cgi-bin/wiki/UsingPkgConfig

basically it uses SCons ParseConfig().


> > We could change that proposing SCons replacements for current
> > tutorials and even packages.
>
> Btw. before someone complains that maemo lacks SCons: the development
> version (and the upcoming 1.0.2 release) of Scratchbox includes it.  (It
> needs patching to work in the Scratchbox environment because it runs the
> build programs in a reconstructed environment with Scratchbox's vital
> environment variables removed.)

Great!

--
Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri
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