[asterisk-dev] Question (and offer) re autotools (autoconf/automake)

[Charl Coetzee]

I am wondering if there are any particular opinions out there arguing 
*against* using autotools for building Asterisk.  Any compelling reasons 
to steer clear of it and stick to the current way of building? Also if 
someone could enlighten me as to the history of trying to get autoconf 
into Asterisk, that would be much appreciated.

I'm asking, because we're lately doing lots of cross-compiling of 
Asterisk, and every new release takes quite a bit of patching to get 
this tailored (especially after the Makefile changes from 1.0 to 1.2). 

We're corporately considering "translating" the current Asterisk 
makefiles to autotools, and  contributing this back to the community. 
(In fact I already have tacit approval for this).

I've done a cursory google on this topic, and found a number of people 
asking for it -- but only a few other references; i.e. back in 2000 when 
the idea of incorporating autotools was welcomed, another at end 2003 
when an initial integration with the then-CVS was offered. I am sort of 
wondering where this has gone, and why, and if I'm missing something. 

If there is a good reason *not* to do this, it would be good to have 
this input up front...

Many thanks,

Charl