[MPlayer-dev-eng] autoconf (was: use gcc instead of calling ld directly)

[D Richard Felker III]

On Mon, Mar 24, 2003 at 07:41:50PM +0100, Arpi wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> > Gabucino <gabucino at localhost.localdomain> wrote:
> > > D Richard Felker III wrote:
> > >> The consensus is that it's the wrong thing to do and that anything
> > >> autoconf-based will be immediately rejected with no questions asked.
> > >
> > > Agreed.
> > 
> > Could someone please explain why?  Or point to a specific thread in
> > the archives?  All I've been able to find so far is that some have
> > said autoconf (but not automake or libtool) would be ok if someone
> > volunteered to do the work, and others have said autoconf is bad but
> > have not given any reasons.
> 
> I said that long time ago, before Pl rewrote the configure script
> from scratch in a modular (functions like cc_check etc) way.
> 
> Now i see no advantages of switching to autoconf, especially that
> no one of the active developers knows autoconf syntax, and in my
> experience autoconf versions are not backward compatible sometimes,
> so running it is a nightmare, and as mplayer is used by users as
> cvs version, it may be a problem for them.
> (for projects releasing tarballs often it is not a problem, as the
> tarball contains teh generated configure script)

I know autoconf, but taking inspiration from MPlayer, I'm ditching it
and writing a configure script by hand for my own projects from now
on. Like Arpi says, the incompatibilities between versions are
horrible (some things require 2.13, others 2.5x) and it keeps getting
more and more bloated with each release. So, if I install 2.5x to
build new programs that require it, I can't build a few old programs
that require 2.13, and suddenly my configure script in my own releases
grows from 100k to 180k with no benefits whatsoever, increasing
webhosting costs and creating a huge annoyance for users on modem. (Of
course this isn't as much of an issue for a huge project like MPlayer,
but it's still evidence that autoconf is idiotic.)

Also I just fail to see how a bunch of ugly M4 macros and unreadable
machine-generated shellscript are preferable to straightforward
human-readable script. If I'm a user and get an error from MPlayer's
configure, I can read the script and actually tell what's wrong. With
autoconf, trying to read the script is hopeless.

Rich