automake vs. GNU make [LWN.net]

automake vs. GNU make

Posted Feb 8, 2008 0:23 UTC (Fri) by vmole (guest, #111)
In reply to: automake vs. GNU make by stevenj
Parent article: LCA: Disintermediating distributions

You didn't read the manual, and as a result it failed on AIX because you asked libtool to support semantics unavailable on that platform

*I* didn't ask libtool to do anything. I'm the end-user. I'm not supposed to have know about libtool, or the variations in shared library implementations. Right? Isn't that the whole friggin point?

And if your response is "But there's too many differences, libtool can't hide everything", then we are in 100% agreement. Where we differ is whether or not it's worth the attempt, and whether libtool is the correct direction. So be it. But if you continue to ignore those of us who have problems, and blame the users, well, it will never get better.

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automake vs. GNU make

Posted Feb 8, 2008 0:42 UTC (Fri) by stevenj (guest, #421) [Link]

You haven't suggested any way for things to get better, you've just flamed a tool because you've encountered a couple of buggy packages that misused it, and it didn't correct for all the deficiencies of the developers. Then you tried to debug the problem yourself and failed because you didn't bother to read the fine manual.

Your suggestions, as far as I can tell, have been either for every developer to reinvent the wheel by rolling their own platform-dependent scripts, or for the developers to push the whole problem onto the end-users by giving them a raw Makefile and telling them to fix the compiler options themselves. Neither of these seems like an improvement.