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
./configuremakemake installtarballs
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
It doesn’t matter if we “people use it in new projects”, but rather, we often have to compile stuff that use them. So they need to be around, regardless of how bad they are. Just last week my husband had to compile two emulators that used autotools.