I had a teeny pet project using GNU assembly that was going to target two platforms.

Instead of keeping my handwritten worst-practices Makefile I decided to try GNU Autotools for the educated reasons of:

  • Text scrolling by looks pretty
  • Vague memories of ./configure make make install tarballs

I got hit with mysterious macro errors, recompile with -fPIE errors (didn’t need this before?), autotools trying to run gcc on a .o file w/ the same options as an .s file, “no rule for all:”, and other things a noob would run into. (I don’t need a bugfix, since my handspun Makefile is “working on my machine” with uname -m.) So there’s a bit of a learning curve here, inhibited by old documentation and more quietly, genAI being shittier than normal in this department

With this I ask:

Do people still use Autotools for non-legacy stuff? If not, what do people choose for a new project’s build system and why?

edit: trimmed an aside

  • foolOP
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    2 days ago

    Wow, you’re right, autotools dev work started a decade prior to Linux 0.01’s release. And looking deeper into ./configure, there looks to be checks running here that only matter on old Solaris systems…

    At least it’s not node_modules

    They call it a polyfill because it polyfills your disk

    • ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org
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      2 days ago

      They call it a polyfill because it polyfills your disk

      nah, but storage is cheap bro, you really should just buy another hard drive! don’t even think about going below 4 TB, of course!

      /s