LCA: Disintermediating distributions

> In my experience with developing many actual programs using autoconf,
> the checks in the configure script are a direct consequence of porting
> to some platform or another. ("Crap, MinGW doesn't support
> gettimeofday, we'll need to check for it and whatever alternative is
> available.")

Yes, basically the configure checks are necessary.
Autoconf itself wasn't so bad. But then additionally you have to 
understand how it works together with automake and libtool. This is what 
made it really hard for me.

And I'm sure this is also the reason why many programs run much more 
configure checks than they actually need. They take the autotools stuff 
from some existing project and just change it so that it can build their 
program. With this approach you end up with all the configure checks the 
original script had, and maybe later on you have to add some more. IMO it 
is simply too hard to build a simple program using autotools. Who wants 
to learn that just to build hello world ?

Using other build systems, as e.g. cmake, makes this trivial:

add_program(helloworld hello.c)

That's all, cmake will do a few checks to find the compiler, check that 
it actually works and figure out if it's a 32 or 64 bit compiler, and 
that's all.
I guess for Scons it's similar.

Also autotools don't doesn't push you to use some modular style, at least 
in KDE we ended up with a few huge scripts which did a lot of magic. E.g. 
CMake strongly encourages a modular system (while it is of course still 
possible to throw everything into one file, but then you intentionally 
work around its features).

Alex