Steven T. Hatton wrote:
On Monday 01 March 2004 06:28 pm, Davi de Castro Reis wrote:
Steven T. Hatton wrote:
Autotools documentation is really not that good, but when you get it, well, you get it.
Do you happen to know a way to dump all the targets in a Makefile in a way similar to Ant's -p (or older -projecthelp)?
You can try bash-completion, although not all the targets will be as usefull as you think.
Oh, I've been using this stuff from the consumming end for the better part of a decade. I know it does great things. Ant does some pretty nice stuff as well. I don't recall where, but I do recall one leading developer proclaim that after working with Ant she'd be happy if she never had to look at a Makefile again.
Well, since I learned how to work with autotools I never looked at a Makefile again.
Of course Ant is typically used for Java builds which do not target specific hardware platforms. It's bound to be less complicated. I suspect there are ways to create the Autotools files so they are much more coherent than they often turn out in real life.
I agree with you. But autotools is very old and very portable. There is no "let us rewrite from scratch" option. I really think that m4 was a bad choice. But you simply can't throw all the macros already written and tested in a huge amount of platforms. Ant is simpler, but the Java platform is also much more well-behaved.
One other thing I'm not sure about is how to work the Qt moc stuff into a standard Autotools system.
Take a look at how kdevelop do it. []s Davi