Software that doesn't use DESTROOT and funny tarball directories

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Jul 19, 2016, at 10:49 AM, Daniel J. Luke wrote:

> On Jul 19, 2016, at 11:44 AM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>> Without reading those links, I already know autotools sucks, and from the standpoint of a software developer I don't really enjoy writing autotools files. However, from the standpoint of a package maintainer, I love autotools for the consistency and compatibility it affords, assuming the project developers use it correctly are keeping up to date with new versions of autotools.
> 
> like how we had to patch many projects when 10.10 came out because they wanted to choose obsolete linker arguments?

It definitely sucked that autotools never anticipated that "10.10" would come after "10.9" and that it should be handled differently from "10.1", and that nobody at Apple or anywhere else noticed the problem before Yosemite shipped. But it was a bug in autotools, which eventually got fixed, so any project using the latest autotools no longer has this bug.

The Intel transition sucked too. Again, bugs in autotools; once fixed and projects updated, no problem.


>> Considering all the various build systems we encounter in MacPorts, from autotools to xcodebuild to cmake to scons to qmake to manually crafted Makefiles, my impression is that autotools sucks the least.
> 
> I guess we can just disagree on that point :)

Dare I ask which build system you prefer?