[MPlayer-dev-eng] autosh*t @ freshmeat

[D Richard Felker III]

On Sun, Jun 22, 2003 at 01:48:50AM +0200, Arpi wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> fm has a new article, about the bad side of auto* tools
> (ok it's actually a big flamewar :))
> 
> http://freshmeat.net/articles/view/889/
> 
> worth to read, including the comments.

I'm not going to bother with posting on FM because most the people
there are rather uneducated and talking nonsense, but it's good to see
articles like this show up in any case. :) Unfortunately the author of
the article didn't do quite enough research, and opened himself up to
some counterarguments by the autoconf-fanboi-kiddies, but the basic
premise and lots of the complaints are true. A couple comments...

[Names have been omitted to protect the guilty; I don't even remember
them actually, so I hope it's no one I know... :))]

Loser #1 remarked that incompatible autoconf/automake/libtool/etc.
versions is not an issue for users because they're only intended to be
used by developers. Unfortunately this is nonsense -- tons of projects
in CVS (or even in release tarballs!) require users to run automake
shit themselves. Also, what do you do if you want to develop multiple
projects, one which uses old auto* tools, and another which uses new
ones?? Install both? Write silly scripts to swap which one gets used?
Make your distro's package manager happy???

Loser #2 remarked that auto* is nice because it's so well documented
in O'Reilly books and crap. Actually this is THE PROBLEM. Newbies
don't have any clue how to use make, so they pick up a book that
teaches them how to use bad tools, get addicted to the bad tools
rather than *gasp* learning something, and make crap. It's the same
deal as with MSVC and other windoze tools.

Article author remarked that these tools (auto*) developed because of
deficiencies in make. This is utter nonsense. They developed because
their authors were clueless about how to use make properly. A good
article on the subject (with the mandatory flamebait "Considered
Harmful" title :) is:

  http://www.pcug.org.au/~millerp/rmch/recu-make-cons-harm.html

It discusses the so-called deficiencies of make, and how they're
actually in fact not deficiencies, but the result of people grossly
misusing make.

Finally, about ./configure. For simple stuff it's not even really
needed. For programs that depend pretty heavily on quirks of the
underlying system, or that have lots of optional features (mplayer),
it's definitely nice to have such a program. But this is not an excuse
for it to generate a 1000-line makefile you can't edit by hand!!

(BTW, have you ever stopped to think how many trojans might be hiding
in various packages' autoconf-generated configure scripts, since no
one ever actually reads the output? Imagine if the developer in charge
of releases got rooted and some trojan code was installed in their
system-wide ac m4 macros... Natually a handwritten configure script
does not have this problem since every change is visible as it's
committed to CVS.)

OK, I think that's enough flamebait for now.... It may sound a little
hostile, but if you read what I said and the referenced article,
you'll probably find that it's all true. So wake up, drink the cola,
and move along. We have better things to do than use "autosh*t"... :)

Rich