From kde-core-devel  Wed May 02 18:27:51 2001
From: Alex Zepeda <jazepeda () pacbell ! net>
Date: Wed, 02 May 2001 18:27:51 +0000
To: kde-core-devel
Subject: Re: automake sucks!?
X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-core-devel&m=98883106226992

On Sun, Apr 29, 2001 at 07:12:32PM +0200, Michael Matz wrote:

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

Well it's both.  Automake tends to be the slower of the two.

> 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.

Well there's my mostly complete drop in replacement for autoconf as well,
however if you were to write an automake replacement it would be neat to
build it around this (I'm sure there's lots of little places that could be
cleaned up by not having to deal with automake).

> 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.

Well for now supposedly we don't depend on GNU make.

As to conditionals, how exactly are they depreciated right now?  The last
time someone tweaked the POSIX ACLs plugin for kfiledialog to not use
automake conditionals they broke the build royally.  If they're
depreciated the first thing to do would be to get rid of them, however as
they stand they're a more portable way than depending on the mutually
incompatible GNU or BSD syntax for such Makefile conditionals.

- alex