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Comment by sidarape | Hacker News Reader

What I'm really looking for is a tutorial about autoconf, automake, and friends.

I've found this thoughtbot article very helpful to grasp autotools: https://robots.thoughtbot.com/the-magic-behind-configure-mak...

This seems nice, thank you. I'll read it later.

Don't, it's not needed, just use shell scripts.

Why? It's standardized the project (thus facilitate use by others), manage dependencies, and provide a simple way to manage a project. Also, many other languages have already something that does that (gem, python package, jar) and not C.

1. It's not standardized in any way.

2. It regularly breaks compatibility through regressions or feature removal, thus having to pin a specific version of autotools to a project to build it.

3. It doesn't manage dependencies.

4. It's not simple.

1. For someone that installed Linux From Scratch, I can say that it's really nice that most of softwares use that. It's maybe not standardized like POSIX or other systems, but it's some kind of standardized by default.

3. It does not download the dependencies but it can verify that your system has all it needs to build the project.

I don't have much experience with make and autotools so feel free to disagree with what I said and say why.

Define dependencies. Autoconf checks for api 'usability' such as 'hey in 1981 some unused api since 1982 had a bug in foobar do we have that bug?'. It also just spits out shell scripts in the end but that are bloated beyond belief.

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