Die GNU autotools

[Oron Peled]

On Tuesday, 11 בJanuary 2011 16:35:08 Nadav Har'El wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 11, 2011, Shlomi Fish wrote about "Re: Die GNU autotools":
> > m4 is very vile.
> If I would write it myself, the language I would choose is Tcl - because
> of its "{ ... }" quoting making it easy to include verbatim shell blurbs.

Nadav:
1. In m4 the quote characters are user defined. In very old autoconf
   implementations, they used the default (a ` and a ')
   Modern autoconf uses by default a more visible pair
   of quote characters (a [ and a ] )

2. Actullay, because m4 is just a macro processor, anything in your
   configure.ac file which is not an autoconf macro *IS* a verbatim
   shell script -- the only need for delimited shell blurbs is when they
   are passed as parameters to macros (indeed it's the common use
   case).

Shlomi:
3. While I can see the "learning curve" problem you point to,
    I cannot see how the CMake syntax is any improvement
   over the widely known bourne-shell syntax for writing tests.

   For standard tests that aleady have prepare macros, the syntax
   should be nice in almost any language you pick.
   Predefined example from autoconf (for libsdl):
      AM_PATH_SDL
   or if you want a minimum version:
      AM_PATH_SDL([1.2])
   And than in your Makefile.in (or Makefile.am if you want automake)
   simply add $(SDL_CFLAGS) to compile commands and $(SDL_LIBS)
   to link commands.

Night'

-- 
Oron Peled                                 Voice: +972-4-8228492
oron at actcom.co.il                  http://users.actcom.co.il/~oron
It's not the software that's free; it's you.
        - billyskank on Groklaw
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