LCA: Disintermediating distributions [LWN.net]

LCA: Disintermediating distributions

Posted Feb 6, 2008 23:00 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
In reply to: LCA: Disintermediating distributions by jengelh
Parent article: LCA: Disintermediating distributions

Yes, you just need bash...  a bunch of core utils...  and one heck of a lot of time and
specialized knowledge.

Autotools is a nightmare for any non-trivial task (speaking as an ex-release-engineer).  How
many different autoconfs do they ship with Debian now?  Three?  Four?  How much time has been
lost to otherwise rational people being forced to wade through impenetrable shell scripts?

I really look forward to the day that standardization comes to packaging.  I doubt that it
will involve autotools though!

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LCA: Disintermediating distributions

Posted Feb 6, 2008 23:32 UTC (Wed) by vapier (subscriber, #15768) [Link]

hardly correct.  nothing in autotools depends on bash, and the "core utils" you refer to is a
pretty small list that any and all *nix system provides (awk/grep/sed/etc...).

anyone doing serious work does not care about older versions of autotools (there are actually
only 2 major versions of autoconf), which means you really have to work with the latest
release.

autotools does provide a consistent interface for distribution maintainers to utilize and
package up things.  in fact, most autotool based packages can trivially be handled with the
same template build code.

LCA: Disintermediating distributions

Posted Feb 7, 2008 9:24 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

> anyone doing serious work does not care about older versions of autotools

You ever try to compile an older package with a newer version of autotools?  Failure city.
There's a reason Debian is forced to include so many version of autotools....  and, I assure
you, they are doing serious work.

LCA: Disintermediating distributions

Posted Feb 7, 2008 17:32 UTC (Thu) by stevenj (guest, #421) [Link]

You are talking about different things. Anyone actively developing a program is going to want to use a recent version of autotools. The older versions in Debian are only there to build programs that have not been seriously updated in several years.

This is no different from the reason why Debian ships multiple versions of Python, or gcc, or many other development tools.