Re: autotools alternatives, is anybody using autosetup?

[Eric Wing <ewmailing@...>]

> Is anybody else using autosetup with lua? If there are public repos,
> I'd like to see more examples.
>
> Btw, I also looked at premake, and its pretty much exactly what I
> don't want, a replacement for make, that controls all aspects of the
> build. Nice that its in lua, but no...

I dropped autotools many years ago out of frustration. I found that
autotools did very little to help me (the project writer) to find and
detect which dependencies are available and let me do things
accordingly and that burden was on me to write more m4 scripts and
such. Also, I found the use of libtool by the tool chain to be
excruciatingly slow for large/complex projects.

Also, as others point out, autotools isn't very friendly to
environments that are not built around it (i.e. Windows) so it didn't
really do anything useful for us. Also of note, Apple no longer ships
GNU/GPL based tools with Xcode's command line tools.


I ended up with CMake a long while back. While far from perfect, I
think their overall approach/philosophy is sound. Instead of trying to
micromanage and reinvent the entire build tool chain, CMake is a
meta-build generator that constructs native projects (e.g. Makefiles,
Visual Studio projects, Xcode projects, Eclipse workspaces). This
empowers developers to use the tools they are familiar/comfortable
with.

I did a video introduction on this awhile back to demonstrate how
Makefile users, Eclipse users, Xcode users, and Visual Studio users
would all use a common project under CMake:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLvZTyji_Uw

My biggest gripe is the CMake language. I still have dreams of
resurrecting/finishing the Lua bindings to CMake some day, but its not
something I have time for in the foreseeable future.

For stock Lua, I know there are multiple CMakeLists.txt descriptions
for Lua. I wrote one myself (emphasizing/embracing proper Apple/Mac
conventions which requires some additional code, plus proposing a way
to coordinate independent projects with a simple unifying CMake
script). The repo links can be found here:
http://playcontrol.net/ewing/jibberjabber/mercurial_subrepos_a_past_e.html

-Eric
-- 
Beginning iPhone Games Development
http://playcontrol.net/iphonegamebook/