Re: R.I.P., Configure?

[Matias Atria <atria@math.upenn.edu>]

On Mon, 26 Nov 2001, Ilya Zakharevich wrote:

> But personally, I see no advantage in switching to such a badly
> designed tool as configure; even though the current scheme is
> home-grown, it is/looks much more robust than configure.

autoconf's configure scripts are just as robust as you write them. Could you
elaborate on why you think configure scripts are so bad? In any case I
disagree with the robustness of the Configure script. I don't think it is
robust to rely on built-in lists of directories to locate libraries and
header files, for example. It is far more robust to let the native build
environment handle that instead, as configure scripts do. Also Configure
does not look like it would handle cross-compilation without some tweaking,
although I have not tried that myself.

In any case, I agree that switching from Configure at this point may not be
worth the effort, which is why I wanted to ask first.

Cheers,
Matias.