Re: progress of Subversion autoconfiscation

We will definitely need autoconf.

Where autoconf really comes in handy is not *hard* stuff, like
building shared libraries and object file formats --- autoconf doesn't
help there much --- but the *stupid* stuff, like the proper name of
the time header files, whether your system has ENOTSUP or EOPNOTSUP,
etc. The tons and tons of things that have no real significance to
the meaning of your code, but are the reality of Unix diversity.

Automake I'm less sure about. It does get a lot of things right for
you. I think we should try it for more than a few days before
rejecting it. Let's see how we feel about it post 1.0.

`Recursive Make Considered Harmful' is an interesting paper, and he's
right that Make has been seriously outgrown these days. But his
solution was to write his own build tool, which is an option we don't
have. Using a build tool other than Make would discourage people from
building Subversion at all.
Received on Sat Oct 21 14:36:05 2006