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

[Luigi Rizzo]

On Tue, Feb 14, 2006 at 01:48:31PM -0600, Jeffrey C. Ollie wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-02-14 at 10:22 -0800, Luigi Rizzo wrote:
...
> > Oh, last i tried it did not produce a working configure
> > for freebsd, and despite my numerous requests on their
> > lists, nobody came up with suggestions to fix it
> > (by "fix" i mean trim it to a reasonable size.
> 
> With the smaller community around OpenPBX.org it can be tough to solve
> problems like these where the main developers don't use your particular
> platform.

but see, this is precisely the thing that autoconf should do for you:
take care of dependencies for platforms you don't have.
if it only works on 1-2 platforms, then there is really no point in
using autoconf.

> > once again speaking for myself, usually these things are judged by the result.
> > I suspect that if you come out with a reasonably small config that works
> > on multiple platforms and is readable and maintainable, people
> > may accept or use it. If, on the other hand, it's 2k lines of
> > m4 macros, well...
> 
> With Asterisk/autoconf, it's been kind of a chicken and egg problem.  No
> one has wanted to spend the time writing autoconf files for Asterisk
> because of comments like this.  And until someone takes the time to
> write some autoconf files it's hard to convince people like you that
> it's worth it.

of course without any argument (again, in the form of something
working) it is hard to convince anyone.

i spent probably a couple of days trying to learn how to use autoconf
and fix the openpbx file (hoping it would help me for other projects),
and failed, and i failed to get any help from the mailing lists.

on the other hand, here i have a set of (much smaller) makefiles
that i can manage even though i did not write them, that work
on multiple platforms even though maybe not on any platform on
earth (but still more than _i_` can manage to do with the autoconf
solution) and nobody interested in helping out (sure, why should anyone
care, it's my problem not yours).

(digressing maybe, i am also puzzled that we have a piece of software
here that demands no less than gcc 3.4 and C99 features and gmake and
bison and maybe a few other specific tools (and of course the 3
monsters autoconf automake libtool) yet insist on using the
equivalent of a turing machine for processing the configure
script.)

	cheers
	luigi

openpbx configure.ac trying to learn how it works and 
and we are back to square one: there is a set of makefiles now that
i have not written but that am able to fix; and there is an autoconf
file that is not doing what 
> Jeff



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