GNU autoconf/automake in OpenSSH

[Damien Miller]

On Fri, 19 Jan 2001, Roumen Petrov wrote:

> Is this work for you ?
> 
> mouring at etoh.eviladmin.org wrote:
> 
> > Humor me. =)  How is automake improving our lives?
> Makefile.am is easy.
> 
> > Have we verified that sed will work correctly on every platform
> > for this operation?  Hmmm?? Mainly on Solaris and other platforms
> > that are known to ship brain dead sed.
> if configure script work => sed work. (macro AC_OUTPUT in configure.in)
> 
> GNU tools autoconf/automake improve development.

autoconf is horrid, its language is ugly and incredibly fragile. We 
use it because he have to, I can't imagine anyone actually liking it!

> New make file has dependency information.

Can we not get this with a "make depend" target?

> Makefile.am is easy.

So are plain makefiles.

> In genarated Makefile from automake has rules to rebuild some files
> ( if you change configure.in simply run make )

We can do this with:

Makefile: configure
	./configure

configure: configure.in
	autoreconf

and avoid an additional tool that all developers need to learn and have 
on hand.

IMO automake may be useful IFF you have a large, complicated project 
with many modules and more than a moderate degree of change. Portable 
OpenSSH has none of these attributes.

I don't mean to discourage your contribution but, as Ben implied,
switching to automake does not make our jobs any easier.

-d

-- 
| ``We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on | Damien Miller -
| a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the | <djm at mindrot.org>
| works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, / 
| we know this is not true.'' - Robert Wilensky UCB / http://www.mindrot.org