[vox] cool article on autoconf

[Micah Cowan]

Peter Jay Salzman writes:
 > i normally don't like recommending articles to people, but i think this
 > one is important, and the author is dead-on:
 > 
 >    http://freshmeat.net/articles/view/889/
 > 
 > title: Stop the autoconf insanity! Why we need a new build system.

Hear, hear! It's funny, I've been reflecting on this very thing,
lately.

Of course, autoconf is a very well-written tool for what it
does: my belief, though, is that the extreme inter-UNIX portability
stuff that autoconf was designed for, really isn't such a big deal
these days (unless it's vital you support these older systems). A
certain degree of POSIX compliance seens dependable, and I mostly go
by that. You still have to account for deviances in some systems, but
it's fairly acceptable.

Also, I think a good configuration tool should allow you to run in an
interactive mode (such as Perl's), but provide the ability to spit out
a config file so you can run it non-interactively from then
on. Building a shell tool to do this would be fine.

That still doesn't address certain important issues though: the need
to quickly discover a recursive list of source dependencies (which the
author of this article mentions, but doesn't address). This is the
single largest headache for a control-freak like me who prefers to
compile pretty much everything from source rather than install
packages; but I'm thinking about switching to packages soon because
the headaches of installing from source quickly become to great, for
large projects with many dependencies.

-Micah