On 13/03/14 17:13, Werner LEMBERG wrote: >> Well, I will not be participating in that; > > :-) > >> it's a personal view, but I firmly believe that automake *creates* >> more problems than it solves > > Which ones? Maybe your biased view is related to mingw?
Not entirely. I freely admit that it is a mostly subjective preference, but when the use of automake inflates the size of a source distribution in excess of twofold, for zero functional gain, one feels compelled to ask "why bother?" >> -- indeed, I don't even understand what problem it does solve. > > Out of my head: > > . It automatically generates all the necessary targets in the > Makefile. Depends on your definition of "necessary". It's certainly very good at obfuscation, through multiple levels of excessive redirection. > . It ensures correct dependency handling. What does this mean? GCC tracked dependencies? They are trivial to manage, without all the bloat and obfuscation of automake. > . Integration of gnulib is very, very simple with automake. Let's not go there. Personally, I consider gnulib to be grossly -- and hideously -- over-engineered, and bloated by needless dependencies. > . It ensures that only the documented files become part of the > tarball. Provided you've documented them accordingly, within Makefile.am; this can also be achieved within Makefile.in, while avoiding the bloated overhead of automake. > . In `gnits' mode, it takes care of a lot of distribution stuff that > is very is easy to forget. For example? -- Regards, Keith.
