[darcs-users] down with autoconf

Max Battcher me at worldmaker.net
Thu May 15 05:16:17 UTC 2008


David Roundy wrote:
> On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 6:57 PM, zooko <zooko at zooko.com> wrote:
>> If I'm to be responsible for a certain amount of darcs support going
>> forwards, for example building darcs on Windows, then please allow me
>> to vote in favor of us at least exploring the option of an
>> alternative to autoconf.
> 
> I'm not familiar any autoconf alternatives.  Do you know of any?

I've actually tried a few autotools-based builds recently that went awry 
and I don't envy anyone that manages those builds on a day to day basis. 
  I thought I had seen crazy accretions of build scripts and then 
autotools started to barf on me and I saw a rabbit hole that boggled my 
mind...

So I have looked at some of the alternatives recently, even as I don't 
have any projects currently that need such configuration tools.

Most recently I've heard some good things about Waf:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waf
http://waf.googlecode.com/

I'm not sure if it has everything that Darcs needs, but if someone that 
has even rudimentary Python knowledge is involved there shouldn't be 
many problems implementing what few pieces might be missing.  I've been 
using Python a lot lately and I'm thinking that I might be able to offer 
some small support in that direction.

The Wikipedia link has some good references to other similar tools such 
as Scons and CMake, but from my own (somewhat uninformed, perhaps, as 
I'm not much of a build engineer) reading Waf comes out as the most 
interesting.

--
--Max Battcher--
http://www.worldmaker.net/


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