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Date:      Thu, 18 Nov 2004 10:18:08 -0600
From:      "Conrad J. Sabatier" <conrads@cox.net>
To:        Jonathon McKitrick <jcm@FreeBSD-uk.eu.org>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: BSD equivalents of autoconf, automake, etc.
Message-ID:  <20041118101808.11092f21@dolphin.local.net>
In-Reply-To: <20041118160531.GA43779@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org>
References:  <20041118160531.GA43779@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org>

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On Thu, 18 Nov 2004 16:05:31 +0000, Jonathon McKitrick
<jcm@FreeBSD-uk.eu.org> wrote:

> 
> I'm starting to dabble in these self-contained self-building scripts
> and tools and so on, like automake, autoconf, libtool, and so on.
> 
> Are these the preferred way of doing things on FreeBSD, or is there a
> better or more BSD-way of doing them?
> 
> Some time ago, Terry Lambert suggested that tools such as imake were
> vastly superior, and that the GNU tools were just to compensate for
> the inconsistencies across Linux distros.

He's probably right.  :-)

> I'd like to learn something that makes sense to learn because it is
> practical, but at the same time, without sacrificing too much
> portability.
> 
> jm

The main problem with the GNU auto* tools is their inconsistency across
versions (which is why we still have several versions of each tool in
the ports collection; not because this is A Good Thing, but because
it's a necessity).  A program that will build just fine with one version
will generate errors or other problems with another version.  Most
annoying.

-- 
Conrad J. Sabatier <conrads@cox.net> -- "In Unix veritas"



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