Autotools must die
<p>Me, on the GPSD mailing list:</p>
<p>Once upon a time, I did not hate autotools. Yea verily, it was the morning of the world and all things (even autotools) seemed fresh and new).  I&#8217;d say this innocence lasted until about, oh, 1995.</p>
<p>But autotools was a kluge.  And it did accrete kluges and crocks around it, adding layers of complexity until it became sore difficult to tell which end was up.  And lo, it became a festering pile of special cases and obscure semi-documented rules, leading to a combinatorial explosion of unplanned interactions and obscure lossage.</p>
<p>Like, say, the fact that our make check insists on running gps-makeregress  twice and in spite of being a genuine autotools <i>expert</i> with <i>fifteen years</i> of experience bear-wrestling the sorry fscker <i>I cannot figure out why it is doing this</i>. </p>
<p>Oh, there&#8217;s a reason, all right.  And if I were willing to quintuple the three hours I just spent poking at our build setup I&#8217;m sure I could find it.  But that was three hours <i>wasted</i> as far as solving any real problem was concerned. Life is too short for such nonsense.</p>
<p>Autotools has reached the Chandrasekhar mass limit of software and become a black hole of suck that consumes endless hours of bright peoples&#8217; time without any good result. It is well past time for it to die.</p>
