[webkit-dev] Autoconf

[Krzysztof Kowalczyk]

On 2/20/06, Mike Emmel <mike.emmel at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm working on upgrading the linux port now. For this I feel I really
> should use autoconf.
> Are there any strong feelings  on adding autoconf support for building.

My personal experiences with build software with autoconf, even on
mainstream Linux distros (Debian, Red Hat, Ubuntu) is negative which
means that I failed to build it more often than I succeded. Sometimes
autoconf version that I had was too old, sometimes too new, sometimes
depended m4 macros were not installed but most of the time I would
just get incomprehensible, impossible to debug error message.

Autoconf is better than nothing but I would personally prefer a
hand-written Makefile.

Common belief is that only autoconf/automake etc. is able to support
building under wide variety of Unixes but projects like e.g. ffmpeg
show that it's possible to write a makefile and a custom configure.sh
script that works.

-- kjk