From: Eivind Eklund <eeklund@...>
Date: 2004-09-30T21:36:43+09:00
Subject: Re: autoconf for ruby

On Wed, 29 Sep 2004 04:34:18 +0900, saiph <order@intrage.it> wrote:
> are there any ruby bindings for autoconf?
> i'm looking for macros, docs and examples in order to
> learn to install ruby programs using only the standard gnu
> procedure ./configure, make && make install

Please let me chime in on the side of cutting the head off autotools.

They DO NOT WORK.

If you have to support the ./configure, make a file named "configure"
with your completely own code.  You can find ruby by using
#!/usr/bin/env ruby.


On the autotools and my experience with them:

In their present incarnation, they make porting harder than it was
when hand-porting in 1990 when they were first introduced, and the
underlying porting landscape was much, much worse then than it was
now.

Autotools turn nice Unix machines into Windows machines - either they
work at once, or you get an error message that is effectively
impossible to determine anything from.

The autotools use sh and Makefiles as the target language for a
compiler.  This is a horrible idea.   Almost half a lifetime ago, I
used to crack copy protection for computer games as a hobby.  These
were released as binary only, with whatever tricks the programmer
could throw in to make it harder to remove the copy protection. 
Cracking copy protection that was intentionally made hard to deal with
was an order of magnitude EASIER than fixing autoconf problems.

Propagating this evil into Ruby just because it is "standard" is a
bad, bad idea.

Eivind.