[TUHS] Tools and building: libtool, autoconf, etc. [ trying to have a relevant subject line ]

[Noel Hunt]

I'm surprised no-one has mentioned 'iffe', written by
Glenn Fowler and Phong Vo who were at AT&T. It is simply
a (large) shell script that runs 'feature' files. I have
had problems with it on 64-bit builds but I have had far
too many problems with 'configure' over the years.

'Iffe' deserves to be better known.

On Fri, Sep 15, 2017 at 6:41 AM, Bakul Shah <bakul at bitblocks.com> wrote:

> On Sep 14, 2017, at 1:22 PM, Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com> wrote:
> >
> > I don't have much love for the libtool/autoconf/automake/etc. system.
> > While it works, and is better than nothing, I have always felt that
> > it was the wrong approach.  I am fortunate that I know some of the
> > folks who worked on these tools because they're part of the too complex
> > for casual users thing that I mentioned in my earlier post about open
> > source.
>
> My days of wrestling with libtool/autoconf/automake/cmake are mostly
> in the past. On FreeBSD/MacOS I use pkg/brew. For any new coding I
> mainly use Go. Even cross compiled binaries just work. It has a very
> well engineered ecosystem.
>
> > There are two big advantages to handling portability this way.  First,
> the
> > source code is easier to read; it's not full of #ifdef this and #ifndef
> that.
> > Second, once the portability library existed it just worked and could be
> > reused.  With the GNU tools methodology, every time someone needed to do
> a
> > fopen on a machine where the target behaved differently, the alternate
> code
> > needed to be written.  There was no debugged library where this stuff
> only
> > had to be figured out once.
>
> I agree with this. auto{conf,make}/configure is just the wrong approach.
>
> At Real Networks our media server ran on 12 or so Unix platforms + windows
> +
> macOS9 (at the time). I managed to corral machine dependent code in
> basically
> a couple files for all but MacOS9. No #ifdefs in any other file. C++ also
> helped to hide things like select(2) vs poll(2) from other code.
>
>
>
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