LCA: Disintermediating distributions [LWN.net]

LCA: Disintermediating distributions

Posted Feb 7, 2008 20:04 UTC (Thu) by vapier (subscriber, #15768)
In reply to: LCA: Disintermediating distributions by vmole
Parent article: LCA: Disintermediating distributions

the issues you raise i dont really see being "solved" or even really addressed any differently
with other build systems (cmake/scons/whatever).  a build system cannot really compensate for
a coder's inability to write clean code.  what do you see in other build systems that
encourages different style of coding ?

the example you cite could easily be relegated to a header file without making the real code
messy.  while it is an older example, there are many similar situations that could generally
be solved the same way: take care of OS-differences in one location (sep source or header
file) and keep everything else clean.

(Log in to post comments)

LCA: Disintermediating distributions

Posted Feb 7, 2008 21:22 UTC (Thu) by vmole (subscriber, #111) [Link]

the example you cite could easily be relegated to a header file without making the real code messy.

Bingo. But they're not. Why not? Because people just copy the way previous programmers did things. Maybe the autotools problem is that there are just way too many bad examples out there.

As for other build systems, all I can do is quote the comment immediately above yours, from Alex, apparently a KDE developer: "CMake strongly encourages a modular system (while it is of corse still possible to throw everything into one file, but then you intentionally work around its features)." Autoconf does makes bad usage patterns as easy (or even easier, on first glance) as good ones.