[sword-devel] Autotools Bug?

[Eeli Kaikkonen]

Jonathan Marsden wrote:
> Greg Hellings wrote:
> 
>> Because there are some people who have no desire to learn anything
>> about autotools ...
> 
> Which is fine.  That is their choice.  Such people by definition should 
> probably not also choose to be volunteer developers on a project that 
> uses autotools.  The project team chose its build system.  I submit that 
> developers of that project have some responsibility to know at least the 
> basics of their own chosen toolset.  So the way to avoid learning 
> anything about autotools ... is not to develop with it :)
> 

Sorry, but this is starting to sound ridiculous, even with a smiley.

If some aspect of a project has a problem, it should be fixed. It 
doesn't mean that those who dislike it should go away. If all developers 
who dislike some aspect of this project had gone away there wouldn't be 
many left.

As far as I know quite many people hate autotools. Many projects have 
used it because it has been de facto standard and there have been 
nothing better. Nowadays there are better alternatives available and I 
think many new projects choose them. I guess there wasn't reasonable 
alternatives when the SWORD Project was started. Many, even large, 
projects have migrated to something better. For example KDE switched to 
cmake. They wouldn't have done it if there weren't good reasons. 
BibleTime changed to cmake (quite easily) and Xiphos is probably 
changing to waf. I'd recommend cmake for SWORD. Any new system needs 
learning and I couldn't create a cmake script for SWORD, so I can't 
volunteer, but I just say that "anything is better than autotools".

--Eeli Kaikkonen