Re: iproute2: use automake

On Tuesday 2010-11-16 18:41, David Miller wrote:

quoted

Until you make a convincing case that the existing infrastructure
is a problem, choosing an alternative solution is bogus.

I can't count the amount of times I've seen major source trees
invest tons of engineering into things to decrease the pain of
using things like automake and libtool.

The pro argument for a build system is not that Linux-only projects
receive unneeded portability work, but that the work involved with
maintaining all the commands in Makefiles, which tend to be a source
of update anomalies, gets reduced.

X11 even has a script that basically turns libtool into one big
fat NOP, because on Linux everything libtool tries to figure out
is completely superfluous.

(I was not trying to make a case for Libtool specifically.)

And yet they do use a build system (which happens to be Automake, but
that's not my point). Was their time spent just to produce,
"unnecessary non-sense", as you call it? I can imagine they will
disagree with you.

Don't crap up the tree with unnecessary non-sense just for some
theoretical gain.  Things work just fine right now.

They do not.

* running make in subdirs is broken
* iproute2/arpd compilation fails if db_185.h, atm.h is not present
  and
* people could not quite opt out building arpd when they are
  fine with not having it
* the DESTDIR variable was completely abused
* data files were shoven into /usr/lib where they don't even belong
  (that is, if you care about FHS even a tiny bit)
* NO_SHARED_LIBS=y is broken
* -lresolv was added unconditionally when it's not even needed
* CFLAGS was overriden, which means a user running make CFLAGS="-g"
  will kill the all-important -Wall and -I../include
* Out-of-tree building, anyone?

But what do I say; if it works _for you_, I must be wrong by
definition.