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Alternatives to Autoconf?

Posted by Cliff on from the dodging-the-complexities dept.

Despairing Developer queries: "Once autoconf was a great way to make widely portable programs. But now when you have to spend more time sorting out incompatibilities between autoconf versions, breaking battles between autoconf compatibility wrappers and configure.in compatibility functions that tries to outsmart each other, and on top of that see the list of dependencies increase (it's not that fun to compile perl on unicos) and performance diving rapidly, what is your escape plan? Is there a drop in replacement for autoconf? Is there something else out there that is as portable as autoconf to use instead?"

3 of 108 comments (clear)

  1. You have been 's CONNED by sofar · · Score: 4, Interesting

    SCons isn't the solution either. SCons relies way too heavily on python and doesn't make better distribution tarballs. Most developers using SCons rooll out horrible tarballs that cannot even detect the proper Python version! (blender!!!).

    SCons makes you lazy, do the work, then your application builds BETTER on MORE platforms with autoconf

  2. Mod parent up! by sofar · · Score: 4, Interesting

    pkg-config singlehandedly is creating a sea of calm in autoconf land while still keeping the strength of autoconf. Take Xfce4 for instance. Within a relatively short timeframe this small group (4-5 devs) have written an entire framework that compiles on tens of platforms by using PKG_CONFIG extensively together with autoconf

  3. I have a replacement by Chemisor · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I was pretty fed up with autoconf myself, and wrote a little C app to emulate it. Initial ./configure time dropped to a second and reconfigure is instantaneous. I would recommend it for your simpler projects: bsconf.c and bsconf.h, the latter being the configuration file.