[clug] Why the autotools hate? (Was: Why isn't Java popular on the Linux Desktop?)

[Jack Kelly]

On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 5:03 PM, Brad Hards<bradh at frogmouth.net> wrote:
> On Friday 10 July 2009 16:40:22 Jack Kelly wrote:
>> On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 4:13 PM, Brad Hards<bradh at frogmouth.net> wrote:
>> > My dislikes are based on some very unfortunate syntax changes, and some
>> > not very good use of what autoconf (and to a lesser extent, automake) can
>> > do. As examples:
>>
>> Can you elaborate w.r.t. the syntax changes? I only started using
>> autotools at around autoconf 2.61 and automake 1.10 (or autoconf 2.56
>> and automake 1.7 on MSYS.)
> After you suggested that people don't read the documentation, I hesitate to
> point out
> http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/html_node/Autoconf-2_002e13.html#Autoconf-2_002e13

Ha ha! Well played, sir.

>> > * I've seen a fair amount of stuff that attempted to deal with
>> > portability problems on an ad-hoc basis (e.g. trying to find installed
>> > include / lib directories without using pkg-config).
>>
>> In an ideal world, we'd all just use PKG_CHECK_MODULES in configure.ac
>> . I've hit this with Tcl/Tk, which doesn't ship .pc files. It comes
>> with a fairly hairy m4 file that turns up in /usr/share/aclocal.
>> Partial points for effort, I guess.
> Also not portable to non-unix platforms.

I know that there are pkg-config binaries for win32, which is the only
non-non-unix platform I know. When I was packaging a library, it
looked like pkg-config was the way to go. IYO, is the `best' way of
doing this sort of detection in the general case? Shipping AX_PATH_FOO
macros and installing them to /usr/share/aclocal?

-- Jack