[Mesa-dev] Lets talk about autotools

[Alex Deucher]

On Thu, Nov 29, 2018 at 8:26 PM Eric Anholt <eric at anholt.net> wrote:
>
> Emil Velikov <emil.l.velikov at gmail.com> writes:
>
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I can see why people may opt to not use or maintain the autotools build.
> > Although I would kindly ask that we do not remove it just yet.
> >
> > In Mesa, we have different parts not used by different teams. As such
> > we tend to remove stuff when nobody is around to maintain it anymore.
> >
> > That said, I'm planning to continue maintaining it and would appreciate
> > if we keep it in-tree.
> >
> > As people may be concerned about bugreports and alike we can trivially
> > add a warning (as configure is invoked) to forwards any issues to my
> > email. Additionally (or alternatively) we can have an autotools bugzilla
> > category with me as the default assignee.
> >
> > What do you guys think?
>
> Strongly disagree.  We shouldn't be maintaining build systems for fun,
> we should be doing the minimum amount of build system work to get our
> actual work done quickly and reliably.

If someone has a legitimate use for it and wants to maintain it, why
not?  How is the build system any different than a specific feature in
the project?

Alex