Re: [VANILLA-LIST:3139] GNU make required

[Trent Piepho <xyzzy@speakeasy.org>]

On Thu, 25 May 2000, Jeffrey Nowakowski wrote:

> This is a late response, but I was going through some old mail.
> 
> Trent Piepho <xyzzy@speakeasy.org> wrote:
> >
> > Can't tell you that, I hate autoconf.
> 
> Why?

For one thing, you get kludge compile lines, like:

gcc -I. -I.. -Iinclude -I. -I. -L. -DNOT_USED -L.. -L../lib -DMEANINGLESS -DDEF
INED_ELSEWHERE -O4 -I/usr/local/include -O0 -g -fno-strength-reduce -c ./../src
/foo.c -o ./../src/foo.o

And that's a short one!

It's also a pain in the as to get an autoconf program to compile if it doesn't
work out of the box.  If the autoconf script can't find a library and include
and you know where it is, it can sometime be impossible to tell autoconf that. 
The makefiles it generates are also huge, and if you have a project with lots
of subdirectories make takes a long time to just to spawn 500 sub-makes and
parse ten of thousands of lines of Makefiles.