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List:       kde-core-devel
Subject:    Re: automake sucks!?
From:       Michael Matz <matz () kde ! org>
Date:       2001-04-29 17:12:32
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Hi,

On Sun, 29 Apr 2001, Oswald Buddenhagen wrote:

> i've heard several people on these lists complaining about automake.

Usually it's not automake which is complained about, but rather often
autoconf.

> indeed, it is a bit unflexible and makes the am_edit hack necessary.

am_edit won't go away easily (for the reasons you stated already), but I
that it's needed _together_ with automake disturbs me.  As time permits
(and the last weeks this wasn't the case often) I was writing an am_edit
replacement which also does automake's work.  This allows a cleaner
implementation of it's features.

> so here is an alternative idea. i've seen this in many projects, namely
> wine (which is rather big, i would say).
> there is ONE central rule file (usually something like Rules.mak) in

Those projects are more often than not tied to GNU make.  That said, the
above replacement (which is still in a quite virtual form) also uses a
central makefile for common stuff (that includes most rules and the
autoconf variables), and for that it's far easier to base it on one make
standard (even the include directives to make such stuff work at all are
not the same for different makes).

> the build root. this file is included by all Makefile.in's (which are
> now written by hand and are quite small).

Well, our Makefile.am's are also quite small and written by hand ;-)

> and now tell me, why this is a bad idea ... :)

It's not ;-)  But as we anyway need some preprocessor in am_edit style we
can also do most stuff there, instead of writing clever (and unportable)
Rules.mak, so that at least we have a slight chance to make this work on
non-GNU make's.


Ciao,
Michael.

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