Re: OT: useless rant, Was: Building Subversion 1.2 on OS X 10.4 fails

On Fri, May 13, 2005 at 10:33:27AM +0200, Holger Rauch wrote:
>
> Ah, you're saying that making the programmer messing around with makefiles
> is better than having a correct one automatically generated for you (in case
> you pass the right option to configure)?

If autoconf actually reliably created working Makefiles et. al., it
would be tolerable. But it doesn't. It breaks in completely undebuggable
ways, and breaks differently on every new release (of autoconf,
not subversion). And don't even get me started on the whole option
nightmare.

So yes, I would rather spend 1 minute editing a Makefile than 10 or 20
minutes watching configure repeatedly look for stdio.h. (Even that would
be tolerable if it then didn't also check for printf(), etc. etc. etc.)

And then, of course, is the horrible #ifdef code mess that using
autoconf encourages. There are good ways and bad ways to achieve code
portability. Automating the worst one was a Bad Idea.

Steve

-- 
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask
about Exchange Server next.
                           -- (Stolen from the net)
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