[Pianod] Pianod Digest, Vol 2, Issue 3

[Peter Li]

On Wed, 2012-12-05 at 08:26 -0500, Perette Barella wrote:

> I'm researching GNU Autoconf to make a more portable build system, but while I'm good with code, I lack skill with build tools.  I'm in over my head and muddling my way through.  Michael Hines has provided info on the -lbsd and we've worked out a uname query to detect Linux, so if the autoconf transition isn't forthcoming I'll see about adding some more automation to the existing makefile to get by.
Indeed, the autoconf stuff in latest kind of threw me.  Rather than 
replacing Makefile with Makefile-linux and just going for it, I first 
tried running autoconf, which went for a while and then complained that 
Makefile.in was missing.  That's mostly what I was referring to about 
SVN and latest looking pretty different.  Why does SVN have one Makefile 
while latest has the two?

I don't have too much useful to say about autoconf versus other ways to 
go.  My experience with build systems is almost entirely from the 
outside looking in.  I have had experiences with projects where the 
autoconf input files were not updated, so that an up-to-date autoconf 
would no longer generate valid Makefiles (or even run in some cases); in 
that case everyone seemed to have reverted to using the Makefile 
generated by the old autoconf; that Makefile still worked but was now 
unintelligible...  I've found cmake nicer to deal with in a couple 
cases, but it also has annoyances; e.g. some of the built-in functions 
for autodetecting python libs do some stupid and nasty things IIRC.