Autotools

Do the expert programmers at /prog/ use the GNU Autotools?

Also, are the Autotools really the de facto tools to create software packages?

Ah. I always confuse the two because they're both stupid.
Jam's the one that reinvents the 'make' wheel, badly: still has nasty syntax that imo is still unnecessarily terse and unintuitive, and in places even *worse* than a standard Makefile, while not offering anything significantly better in terms of functionality; it adds on the necessity to download another program in order to build a package using it (here's a suggestion for potential future build system designers: make it compile into a shell script); and in spite of several decades of system design and innovations such as shared libraries and headers, system-wide script directories, etc., it still doesn't offer any way to make a simple file that says the equivalent of "here's some C files, you know what to do with them".

These guys seriously all need to look at how IDEs present builds: in the common case, it's mostly a matter of drag and drop a bunch of files onto a project and click the "compile" button. Now make a text-file syntax that equates to this, portably.


Incidentally, this is more or less what automake tries to do, but it's a hopelessly byzantine system that tries to support systems that NO ONE USES, and it's all built in and leaves no way for the developer to say "please don't add sixty lines of code checking whether or not the project needs to support this header-file eccentricity only found on the PDP-10, because we don't give a fuck about that system."