Replacing Makefiles isn't the hard part. People do it all the time.
The hard part is figuring out a migration path away from Autotools. Not even replacing them, that's relatively easy. Integrating them into a world dominated by Autotools, that's difficult.
Hm. At first glance this doesn't seem too bad: idiomatic autotools usage involves files that are relatively easy to parse and are also relatively declarative, so making a non-autotools buildsystem that's capable of directly reading configure.ac and Makefile.am files seems doable.
Why doesn't this work in practice? Non-idiomatic usage? Custom autoconf scripts?
Comments
Ah makefiles. It's 2014 and they still can't handle spaces in directory names.
http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?712
I'm pretty sure that trying to replace them at this point is sacrilege.
Replacing Makefiles isn't the hard part. People do it all the time.
The hard part is figuring out a migration path away from Autotools. Not even replacing them, that's relatively easy. Integrating them into a world dominated by Autotools, that's difficult.
Hm. At first glance this doesn't seem too bad: idiomatic autotools usage involves files that are relatively easy to parse and are also relatively declarative, so making a non-autotools buildsystem that's capable of directly reading configure.ac and Makefile.am files seems doable.
Why doesn't this work in practice? Non-idiomatic usage? Custom autoconf scripts?