Re: build process and portability

[Rob Browning]

Tom Lord <address@hidden> writes:

> I'm skeptical that automake and autoconf-style portability are a
> wise choice.  Of course they create additional external
> dependencies.  They litter code with #ifdefs.  And you can
> definately get by without them.

If someone came up with a good, extensible, and clean Guile based
replacement to autoconf/automake, I'd be happy to see about using it.
Frankly, I've kinda wanted something like that for a long time.  But
until that happens, I think that we're probably better off focusing
our efforts elsewhere.  autoconf and automake, though awkward and
ugly, are something that many people, both from the users and builders
perspective, are already familiar with, so until there's a complelling
alternative, I don't think it's worth switching and adding yet another
thing people have to learn in order to either hack on or just build
guile.  One other advantage to using autoconf/automake is that there's
no bootstrapping problem.  If we did decide to write a build system in
guile, we would have to deal with the problems raised by porting to
new architectures.

-- 
Rob Browning
rlb @defaultvalue.org, @linuxdevel.com, and @debian.org
Previously @cs.utexas.edu
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