social.noyu.me

i don't love the tone of this article but i agree with a lot of what it says about gnu automake. my experience with it in php was awful. it belongs in the dustbin of history https://felipec.wordpress.com/2024/04/04/xz-backdoor-and-autotools-insanity/

‪shell scripts are arcane enough when they're little things written in bash. automake is a massive shell script library written in m4‬

‪the thing about build scripts is that nobody cares about them. you write your project in c, c++, rust, whatever… some language you know well and enjoy using. but in order to actually configure/compile/link/package it, inevitably you need Some Other Language to help you‬

‪you don't care about the beauty of your build system. build systems are hell. you just want it to work. almost always the resulting code is far from beautiful. if it is readable and well-structured, it probably hasn't made contact with multiple platforms or configurations yet‬

@hikari agree ... even if your build system only has to deal with a single platform, because it builds the platform, it's still hell ... it's just all awful ...

one day I'll gonna write my own build system x.x

@littlefox @hikari there are reasons i prefer build systems (for projects complex enough to need them) declarative and not turing-complete, and why i’m shilling meson so hard

(okay mostly i’m just a distro packager who also used to cross-compile for windows and… i’ve seen things)