Rejuvenating Autoconf

Posted Oct 27, 2020 17:31 UTC (Tue) by nwnk (guest, #52271)
Parent article: Rejuvenating Autoconf

As someone with no particular love for autotools (to put it kindly), this is really encouraging to see. It may reflect the design decisions of an earlier era, but autotools occupies a substantial amount of the build system space for the free software ecosystem, and keeping them relevant helps keep the free OS viable.

If anyone does feel like taking a crack at updating the automake / libtool portion of the world, there's at least two interesting pieces of prior art that may be worth plundering.

dolt: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/archived-projects/dolt/-/t...

An attempt to address libtool's (lack of) performance by lifting some of the work to configure time.

Quagmire: https://code.google.com/archive/p/quagmire/

Reimplements automake/libtool in terms of gnu make. There's an argument to be made that most of the build-portability problem ought to be solved by asserting that your first steps are to get (possibly just download rather than build) a working cc/sh/make, and confine all the platform variation handling to those components; this seems like it might get you some of the way there.

Rejuvenating Autoconf

Posted Oct 27, 2020 22:33 UTC (Tue) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]

I was the original author of dolt. (The name came from writing scripts like "doltcompile" that replaced libtool's "ltcompile".)

I wrote dolt to speed up builds of software that used libtool, for the common cases of Linux and BSD systems where most of the extra complexity of libtool didn't apply (because the system already has full-featured library support). It typically cut library build times in half. libtool later did a lot of optimization work to try to handle the common cases better, and I dropped dolt once libtool was close to the same performance.

The key thing dolt did: do autodetection steps *once* and generate a script that runs the necessary commands, rather than doing any amount of autodetection for every compile.