[ptx] Switch to autotools?

[Marko Mäkelä]

On Thu, Jul 01, 2004 at 01:31:04AM +0200, Pablo d'Angelo wrote:
> I'm using the mingw32 compiler on debian, but I haven't found the win32
> wxWidgets version and all needed win32 libs (tiff,jpg,png,zlib) in debian,
> so I compiled them myself.

I've used mingw32 on Debian as well.  On Windows, the MSYS system made by
the MinGW folks is good enough for running configure scripts.  It even
includes vi. :-)

> > Currently I have problems compiling CVS hugin from scratch on debian/sid.
> > Of course all issues are not severe and solvable, but if there are no
> > objections I could rewrite hugin's Makefile generation with autotools.
> 
> No, I don't have objections, I just tried auto* tools several years ago and
> found them very messy, but that was probably my lack of shell programming
> knowledge and inablility to read/understand the autotools info page. Having
> that in mind, I started to use some some older makefiles I had from previous
> projects.

I think that autotools is a messy solution.  It may have been a good idea some
10 years ago, when there were several different Unix-like systems in wide use,
but the current systems are POSIX compliant, and it's easy to get things to
work with some #ifdefs.  For C++ programs, autotools doesn't really make much
sense, because native C++ compilers are often hopelessly out of date.  Although
the standard (ISO 14882) was approved in June 1998, it took most Unix vendors
several years to get their C++ compilers right.  I had no problems with
g++ or Digital's C++ compiler in 1998, but Sun's and HP's compilers weren't
good enough for my programs until 2001 or 2002.

If you know that you will always be compiling with g++, why bother with
autotools? Autotools generates problems on its own: the auto* package
versions must match both with each other and with the macros used in
configure.in and Makefile.am.

	Marko Mäkelä
	http://www.funet.fi/~msmakela/