[geeks] UNIX development and makefile discussion

[Jochen Kunz]

On Wed, 14 Aug 2013 11:27:05 +0000
microcode at zoho.com wrote:

>  Aside from writing portable code what should I be considering?
cmake: http://www.cmake.org/
cmake will perform automatic tests to find platform speciffic options
like where include files are to find and then it will generate
makefiles. Think of it as "meta-make". cmake eases the tedious process
of writing makefiles and organizing them considerably.

The GNU autotools (autoconf, automake, auto...) do similar things. But
I do not recommend them. Every time I have to use autoconf it drives me
insane because it is so arcane. It polluts projects with GNUisms and
simply doesn't work well in todays *ix environement. Most autoconf
scripts I came across are badly written (due to autoconfs idiosyncrasy)
and thus don't work well. So I have to play dirty tricks to autoconf to
make it do things the way I need. So instead of doing things
automaticaly I have to do them manually and doing it manualy is a PITA
with autoconved stuff. Avoid autoconf like the plague!
-- 


\end{Jochen}

\ref{http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/}