Depending on external libraries

[Keith Packard]

Around 12 o'clock on Mar 16, Egbert Eich wrote:

> My point here is that Imake is probably not more or less disgusting
> than any other build environment. People like what they are used to.
> You are trying to convince people who are used to Imake to switch.

I actually dislike imake *and* autotools.  They're both ugly and broken,
but I am not willing to spend my time building and maintaining either imake
or some perfect replacement system.  

This is the the key to me: imake loses not because it's more broken than
autotools, but mostly because all of the maintenance necessary to make it
run on new systems or work with new strange bits of code we need to stuff
into the tree falls on our shoulders. You and I have both spent too much
time hacking the basic imake infrastructure when we could have instead been
working on the window system.

Many horrid kludges I've made with imake (like the horror in lib/font) has 
a nice clean solution in autotools because someone else who cared about 
the build system created a better solution.  I, in my attempts to avoid 
fixing imake, kludged around it instead.  Much nicer to have a system that 
provides intrinsic capabilities that already solve these problems.

Remember, the main reasons that I moved my code to autotools were 
primarily because imake can't do a modular build, and secondarily because 
I didn't want to spend any more time fixing imake.  That the transition is 
sometimes difficult for us imake dinosaurs to make is problematic, but I 
think we can manage.

I really don't think we have a choice here; imake just isn't capable of
building a system distributed as many small packages, it really can only 
deal with a monolithic software distribution.  We could rewrite imake to 
handle a modular environment, but I think we have better things to do with 
our time.

We need to learn to stop worrying and love the autotools.

-keith


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