On Mon, Mar 16, 2015 at 7:31 PM, Chris Barker <chris.barker@noaa.gov> wrote:
On Mon, Mar 16, 2015 at 6:24 AM, anatoly techtonik <techtonik@gmail.com> wrote:
"Autotools has reached the Chandrasekhar mass limit of software and become a black hole of suck that consumes endless hours of bright peoples’ time without any good result. It is well past time for it to die." (c) "Autotools must die", ESR. http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1877
I couldn't sum up this better. It looks even worse from Windows machine.
Is it even used for building Python on Windows (for the "normal" python.org builds)?
There was some success with MinGW toolchain, but I am not tracking if it was integrated into official source. The FUD was that compiled extensions are not compatible between MSVC builds and MinGW builds, but I could not confirm that. If I understand correctly, the incompatibility is only for C++ programs, because of strange SEH strategy and proprietary name mangling.
But to miss-paraphrase Winston Churchill [1]:
"Autotools is the worst build system except for all the others."
Is there really something better out there?
A lot of attempts are made, but reviewing them requires a lot of time and effort.