Die GNU autotools

[Shachar Shemesh]

On 12/01/11 15:49, Nadav Har'El wrote:
> Actually, the Linux kernel doesn't use autotools;-)
>
> It assumes that the compilation system is a familiar GNU/Linux setup, and
> won't work at all on other Unix versions, C compilers which aren't recent
> versions of gcc, and so on.
>    
I think there's a slightly different reason for that. Autoconf works 
well when most of the customizations required can be automatically 
detected by the configure script. For the Linux kernel, this is not the 
case. The kernel has zero runtime dependencies (and very few compile 
time dependencies), and so no automatic configuration is required at 
all. Instead, it has a huge amount of user configurations required, far 
too much to be passed as "--with" and "--enable". As such, I think it 
justified that it does not go for autoconf, but rather a menu based 
system stored in a text file.

Shachar

-- 
Shachar Shemesh
Lingnu Open Source Consulting Ltd.
http://www.lingnu.com