r16624 - gnucash/trunk - Remove the spurious m4/ directory. Use macros/ instead.

[Martin Preuss]

Hi,

On Dienstag, 11. Dezember 2007, Derek Atkins wrote:
> Christian Stimming <stimming at tuhh.de> writes:
[...]
> What do you mean by "nobody was able to understand"?  The configure
> script is mostly Shell script with a bunch of m4 convenience macros to
> implement pieces of shell script over and over.
[...]

I think personally that the autotools do a pretty good job once the 
configure.ac and Makefile.am's are setup properly.

It is surely a good idea to use cmake for new projects but I wouldn't change a 
perfectly working build-system in well established projects without really, 
really good reasons ...

With AqBanking - where we have multiple plugins, libraries and tools - the 
autotools in fact do a tremendous job: I'm able to compile on any POSIX 
system so far and even cross-compile for WIN32 platforms on Linux without 
changing a single line.

As far as I know - at least that's what I read - cmake isn't very well tested 
in cross-compile environments, so a transition right now might cost you the 
ability to easily create WIN32 packages...

BTW: I tried once to compile a VTK project (which used cmake) and I wasn't 
able to do so... So cmake doesn't seem to be as intuitive as "./configure && 
make && make install" :-/

[...]
> Yes, cmake is available on Fedora, but it isn't installed by
> default.  On the other hand, the auto tools ARE installed by default.
> Granted it's not too hard to "yum install cmake", along with all
> the other dependencies.
[...]

I don't think the autotools are installed on every system by default, but they 
aren't needed in most cases: To actually compile and install a tarball the 
autotools (autoconf, automake etc) aren't needed. If you are talking 
about "make" and "gcc": Well, you are right, it seems more systems install 
gcc and make than do cmake.

But maybe I'm just biased since after a few years I'm finally feeling like I 
can manage the autotools :-))


Regards
Martin



-- 
"Things are only impossible until they're not"

Martin Preuss - http://www.aquamaniac.de/
AqBanking - http://www.aqbanking.de/
LibChipcard - http://www.libchipcard.de/