Peter Samuelson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > [Goswin von Brederlow] >> The big problem is that those autogenerated build scripts will be non >> deterministic on the buildd network and on users system. Depending on >> the installed packages (automake/autoconf versions) you get different >> results and often failures. :( > > What low expectations we have. Why are we willing to tolerate this in > autotools? We wouldn't tolerate it in other development tools like > make. Reliable ability to build things seems to be a fairly basic > property of a build tool.
Even make breaks from time to time. I distinctly remeber an update of make that caused problems. There are also several gcc versions that are quite different in their behaviour. But unlike automake/autoconf we only have one version of make in the archive and everything is fixed to work with it. We also only have one gcc-x.y that is the default gcc with only a few exceptions and again everything is fixed to work with that. Somehow with automake/autoconf there have always been multiple versions in the archive and nobody cared much for updating every source package to the latest automake/autoconf. It probably is due to the fact that you can change the source and build it without altering the configure.in/Makefile.am/Makefile.in files in most cases. MfG Goswin -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]