if you like autotools we definitely aren't going to be friends

[whitequark@social.treehouse.systems]

if you like autotools we definitely aren't going to be friends

[whitequark@social.treehouse.systems]

this is because autotools gives you the sort of brain damage that makes you look at some of the most atrocious interfaces in existence and go "This is good actually. I will go and argue with strangers about how good my dogshit collection of generated shell scripts is" instead of building anything that improves people's lives rather than worsening them

[whitequark@social.treehouse.systems]

anyway I hate autotools and if you try to convince me that autotools are good I will probably hate you, too

[whitequark@social.treehouse.systems]

people think I like cmake because I hate autotools. nothing could be further from truth. cmake is a barely-functioning pile of atrocious C++ that includes what is probably the second-worst interface of a build system. however, my hatred for autotools far eclipses my desire to never interact with cmake again, to the point where I ended up becoming a cmake expert against my wish and desire

[joe@f.duriansoftware.com]

@whitequark i admire (from afar) the determination to build something out of only what the lowest-common-denominator of a bunch of 80s-era Unix platforms provides. much in the same way i admire other incredible gross hacks like windows 95

[whitequark@social.treehouse.systems]

@joe no yeah this is reasonable

I will begrudgingly accept autotools as a form of performance art. I just don't think we should build an OS out of performance art that is squishy and smells weird

[whitequark@social.treehouse.systems]

I would strongly prefer to never use cmake again in any context (even though it would mean I don't get to charge people quite nice consulting fees to unfuck their CMake situation), but unfortunately people keep making build systems that are inexplicably somehow worse, like Bazel

(Bazel makes a lot of sense if you are Google, and is excruciatingly painful to use if you aren't Google. it's also almost completely undocumented; if you thought it was hard to figure out how to make CMake does something, allocate like 20× as much time for Bazel)

[floe@hci.social]

@whitequark Reading this thread and the replies seems to indicate that a non-horrible build system cannot exist. As two additional data points, allow me to throw in Scons and Gradle. 😖

[dotstdy@mastodon.social]

@whitequark I only get to hate cmake because in my industry somebody would literally murder you if you tried to use autotools.

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@floe @whitequark

Does Makefile plus a bunch of hand-coded scripts count as a build system?