More information on the X11R7.0/X11R6.9 release [LWN.net]

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

Posted Dec 24, 2005 17:10 UTC (Sat) by dmantione (guest, #4640)
In reply to: More information on the X11R7.0/X11R6.9 release by Zarathustra
Parent article: More information on the X11R7.0/X11R6.9 release

Actually, auto* is completely unusable for portability. The reason is it
assumes Unix. I'll sum up some OS-es: Linux, FreeBSD, Win32, WinCE,
NetBSD, AmigaOS 4, MorphOS, MacOS Classic, Mac OS X.

Now, for how many platforms does auto* help? About half of them. In other
words, auto* solves the portability problem for about 50% of the OS-es.
Now 50% is pretty impressive, right? Not at all, since Unixes have a lot
in common, the porting effort for the other OS-es is a lot more than 50%
of the porting effort, in case you should want to support them all.

To be able to build auto* crap on non-Unix systems, of which Win32 is one
of the most common, one needs a Unix-emulation environment, like Cygwin.
However, this does not produce native applications.

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

Posted Dec 26, 2005 14:25 UTC (Mon) by alvherre (subscriber, #18730) [Link]

Amazing how much a thread can drift from the original article. Did anybody take a look at why autotools were chosen, back when they were chosen? I remember reading an article about it, which mentioned that other build systems were considered but rejected for various reasons (SCons is the one I remember.) The X.Org developers didn't make an uninformed nor arbitrary decision.

About autotools themselves and non-Unix portability, let me point out that autoconf (but not automake) is used in PostgreSQL to produce native Win32 (MinGW) and Mac OS X binaries, besides the obvious Linux, various BSDs, Solaris, AIX, Irix, etc. At one point it supported QNX, BeOS and other systems as well, though those appear to be abandoned for lack of reporters (users with compiler access). So your comment about'em being Unix-only appears to be at least partially incorrect.

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

Posted Dec 28, 2005 10:45 UTC (Wed) by dmantione (guest, #4640) [Link]

Autotools are only usable outside Unix if you load a bunch of Unix junk,
i.e. cp, mv, sed, awk, and other Unix tools onto the OS you port to which
is effectively emulating Unix on such an OS. Besides that it is not fun
it causes portability problems since those tools must be ported as well.
There is no way to make Autotools use copy or move for example in Win32.

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

Posted Dec 28, 2005 14:00 UTC (Wed) by hppnq (subscriber, #14462) [Link]

Just a slight remark: autoconf and friends are mainly used by developers, as an ordinary user who wants to install a new piece of software you just run configure, so that's where your portability problems start.

No need to make things more complicated than they already are.