Rejuvenating Autoconf

Posted Oct 24, 2020 20:35 UTC (Sat) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: Rejuvenating Autoconf by marcH
Parent article: Rejuvenating Autoconf

> Let's please focus and ask developers to spend their very limited build patience and energy on tomorrow's build problems, not yesterday's.

Sure, one can argue about the details of autotools' implementation and question whatever arbitrary cutoff it has (or doesn't have) for "ancient" systems... but please keep in mind that while the exact details will change, tomorrow's build problems will be remarkably similar to yesterday's -- software (and deployment) environments are rarely homogenous and usually bleed outside the vertical tooling/language monocultures that are in vogue these days.

Emphasis on bleed.

Rejuvenating Autoconf

Posted Oct 24, 2020 21:54 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

I've been struggling with build systems since 90-s, and today's build problems are NOWHERE close to that old times.

These days people need dependency management, reproducibility, cryptographic checksums for dependencies, bill of materials support, massively parallel builds, etc. None of this was even on the radar back in 90-s.