Why Switch a Big Software Project to autoconf?

woggo queries: "I'm a CS grad student working on a large research project (over 1 million lines of code, supported on many platforms). The project has been under development for several years, and the build system is nontrivial for end-users. We'd like to make it easier to build our software, and I'm investigating the feasibility of migrating to GNU autoconf. I need to demonstrate that the benefits of autoconf outweigh the costs of migrating a large system of makefiles with a lot of ad-hoc kludge-enabling logic. Has anyone made a similar case to their advisor/manager? Does anyone have some good 'autoconfiscation' war stories to share? (I've already seen the Berkeley amd story and the obvious links from a google search....)" Depending on the intricacies of the build process, such a conversion might take an awful lot of work. It might be easier to put a nicer face on the "nontrivial build process", although there is something to be said for the ease of "./configure; make; make install"

Comments

Re:As Pro Linux as I am....

[zCyl]

So you're tired of ./configure, etc... and you want an easy installer script for Linux that you can double click on to install programs? Here, I'll write you a general purpose installer program. Put this with any program you distribute as source and it will automatically install it by simply double clicking. You don't even have to click Next!:

#!/bin/sh
./configure
make
make install

Slashbot Copy n' Paste Frolics

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashbot Fun Time Frolics
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NickTheGreek, London
The traffik's blaadhy murder, but then that's part a' the charm, aint't it?!

What project is it?

[Lozzer]

I'm a CS grad student working on a large research project (over 1 million lines of code, supported on many platforms). The project has been under development for several years, and the build system is nontrivial for end-users.

Linus is that you? Or maybe those whacky XFree86 guys.

the best in build configuration mgmt

[FernandoValenzuela]

You need to move your stuff to Visual C++ dsp and dsw files, man.