Re: individual software releases for third parties

[David Holland <dholland-tech%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Sun, Sep 02, 2012 at 11:38:55AM +0300, Aleksey Cheusov wrote:
 > > It would be nice if a better generator tool than automake existed, but
 > > that turns out to be hard. Very hard, actually. I've tried several
 > > times; each time I discovered that my ideas weren't good enough.
 > 
 > Any details?

It's been a long time; I don't remember the details of each try any
more (IIRC, there were seven...) just the ultimate conclusion, which
is that you need a Turing-complete language for test description and
composition, and a compiler for it that emits sh.

pkg-config is a somewhat different approach and definitely a step in
the right direction; I've been wondering if a lot of the remaining
crud can be dealt with by some kind of base-config package.

If you don't have to worry about config, a tool that just writes
makefiles is, though not entirely trivial, a much simpler
proposition. And it shouldn't be hard to do better than automake.

-- 
David A. Holland
dholland%netbsd.org@localhost