Re: autotools alternatives, is anybody using autosetup?

[Sam Roberts <vieuxtech@...>]

william@25thandclement.com wrote:

>>> The better alternative to autoconf is usually nothing, IMO.

Clearly, I don't agree, or I wouldn't be looking for one :-)

This makefile approach is crap:  https://github.com/sam-github/pcap-lua

It only supports two platforms, but not well, and I have to copy the
boilerplate approach to all my projects, where they slowly
desynchronize.

On Mon, Jul 16, 2012 at 10:26 PM, Coda Highland <chighland@gmail.com> wrote:
> Would you consider LuaJIT to be a "trivial" case? It doesn't use
> anything but straight-up "make".

Yes, I would. I just looked, and luajit appears to have only trivial
dependencies: a C library and gcc. Most of its 600+ lines of
src/Makefile is devoted to figuring out how to call gcc for the
platforms it supports.

I maintain libnet (but did not write it, or make its autoconf system),
and system networking APIs vary enormously, I would describe it
as non-trivial. auto* is mostly for testing existence of dependencies,
when the mere fact that you are compiling on a platform is not
sufficient to know if an optional dependency exists.

Also, if your platform support is wide, it can be better to declare
what you want from a system, then try to exhaustively list for every
supported system, whether you believe it does or does not have a
particular facility.