<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Jan 10, 2011 at 9:56 PM, Tzafrir Cohen <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:tzafrir@cohens.org.il" target="_blank">tzafrir@cohens.org.il</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div>[snipped]</div>
Yeah. You have your own hand-crafted Makefiles. With the only<br>
special-case of Darwin. No need to be portable.<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>All your issues are valid from purity POV. Indeed in some rare cases compiling C files with g++, when cross compiling from Mac OS X to other platform (wow, when would that happen?), you'll have to edit a single, easy to understand line in the top of the makefile, and make distclean doesn't make sense really, it should be dropped altogether (care to issue a bug report?).</div>
<div><br></div><div>But then again, this software is usable today on many platforms, and it makes life easier maintainance-wise for 99.9% of the use cases, and using it in a special way is possible without too much hassle.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Let's compare the situation there with the situation of VLC which uses autotools.</div><div>I had once the doubted pleasure of cross-compiling version 0.86 of VLC to windows on Linux (as recommended by the docs) with a modern distribution software today.</div>
<div>As expected this beast didn't compile even though I had the very same version of gcc and the exact binary libraries required by 0.86. What happened is that for some reason (maybe the autotools version wasn't 100% the same of the autotools version they originally used to build 0.86, or I don't know what) the autogenerated libtool script was broken, reading it and editing the m4 file which generated it was a very difficult job. So I ended up reimplementing libtool with python.</div>
<div><br></div><div>So yes, you'll have errors even with autotools, but I'd rather debug the errors of a hand written readable Makefile than the errors of autotools script. (BTW m4 and bash are indeed Turing complete, but they make great job obfuscating your Turing machine ;-)</div>
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