So between Henrik, Daniel and mainly Diego, I’ve learnt so much about the autotools this last week, that I’ve actually come to like them quite a bit.
At work, we had a messy build system for the longest time. I un-messed it slightly by adding Makefile wrappers around it. But lately, the combination build system has been getting more out of hand. So I put together a protoype of an autotooled build system, and it’s working fantastically. I especially like make dist to create the internal releases.
Before I found Diego to bother him endlessly in irc, I was working of both, the autotut and (of course) the autobook. The autobook seems little out of date. I got furthest with autotut, and then with Diego, it was just like magic. So now we have a fully functional prototype of the new build system in place, and I’m looking to deploy it in a few weeks. I like the added benefit of sanity checking, especially.
At the very least, I have a sincere appreciation of the autotools now 🙂
Edit: I always appreciated them, but in the past it was more of an “at least it’s not Imake” type of appreciation.