More information on the X11R7.0/X11R6.9 release

Posted Dec 23, 2005 22:39 UTC (Fri) by beagnach (guest, #32987) [Link]

Posted Dec 23, 2005 22:51 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

That's what I get for firing off a quick reply before running of to work and I would like to apologize to him for jumping the gun.

Imake sucks and on that he and I agrees.

The thing is that with autotools it's known and usefull for people that don't know the code.

I can take code directly off of the cvs server and run the autoconf stuff to generate a make file, compile, and install the software without having to know anything about the source code that I am dealing with..

Autotool/Autoconf/Autowhatever takes into account not only GNU/Linux-style systems, but other systems like windows, and dozens of other platforms and other toolchains.

This should help people with porting efforts, I expect. If your going to write a makefile for portable software you'd have to have intiment knowledge of not only your system your working on, but every other system that you expect people will want to use your software on.

I understand that it's probably not easy to deal with. But it's not going to be easy to make a portable code base with manually building make files either.

Maybe something like scons or whatnot would of been better, but it's not like those don't have their own problems either.