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Autogen/autotools mess however... not so pleasant when it breaks.

Curious for those who published source with autotools,etc... do you really sit down and figure that out. It's just a mystery that works or doesn't to me. I never have or would go beyond a simple make file. It really seems tedious on top of the actual code you write. A bit impressive tbh.

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Yes, I used autotools[0]. It's definitely hairier than plain make, but you get a lot of useful features on top of it. There's thousands of examples all over the internet so it's easy to reference them.

I like the elegance of pure make, and do use it when appropriate, but I wouldn't really want to reimplement the things autotools does myself in it.

[0]: https://github.com/jbboehr/handlebars.c/blob/master/configur...

What's the alternative? I don't know in advance if the system's seek() supports 64 bits directly or just 32. Or if the user wants a more minimal binary without a certain feature.

Cmake?

Once I figured out how to get it to build python extension modules my life became a lot simpler. The python way (distools?) is easy enough until it isn’t then I reach for cmake.

cmake is not as powerful as autotools.

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