[TUHS] autotools

[Steve Simon]

my personal frustration with autotools was trying to port code to plan9.

i wish autotools had an intermediate file format which described the packages requirements, that way i could have written my own backend to create my config.h and makefiles (or mkfiles)

in the end i wrote my own tool  which crudely parses a directory of C or F77 sourcecode and uses heuristics to create a config.h and a plan9 mkfile, it was named mkmk(1)

it was almost _never_ completely correct, but usually got close enough that the files only needed a little manual hacking.

it also took great pains to generate mkfiles that looked hand written; if you are going to auto generate files, make them look nice.

-Steve