21 Jun
2024
21 Jun
'24
3:42 p.m.
my personal frustration with autotools was trying to port code to plan9.
i wish autotools had an intermediate file format which described the packages
requirements, that way i could have written my own backend to create my config.h and
makefiles (or mkfiles)
in the end i wrote my own tool which crudely parses a directory of C or F77 sourcecode
and uses heuristics to create a config.h and a plan9 mkfile, it was named mkmk(1)
it was almost _never_ completely correct, but usually got close enough that the files only
needed a little manual hacking.
it also took great pains to generate mkfiles that looked hand written; if you are going to
auto generate files, make them look nice.
-Steve