Gregory's Server
Side bar, I know a lot of people are saying "time to scrap autotools for good, everyone should just use cmake/meson/GN/Basel/..." I have a couple different responses to that depending on my mood, but the important one right now is: Do you honestly believe that your replacement of choice is *enough* better, readability wise, that folks will actually review patches to build machinery carefully enough to catch this kind of insider attack?
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2 comments
@zwol M4 always was horrible, and I say that as the original author of GNU M4. The original Unix M4 was weird, and there weren't really any good explanations for why it was the way it was. Apparently someone at Bell labs needed a preprocessor and wrote M4, sometimes in the '70, for no other greater purpose than to scratch a personally itch. GNU M4 only exists because RMS wanted GNU to have what Unix had, and while I wanted to do something different and better, RMS convinced me to do M4 first. |
On the subject of implementation language, I have one half-baked idea and one castle in the air.
The half-baked idea is: Suppose ./configure continues to be a shell script, but it ceases to be a *generated* shell script. No more M4. Similarly, the Makefile continues to be a Makefile but it ceases to be generated from Makefile.am. Instead, there is a large library of shell functions and a somewhat smaller library of Make rules that you include and then use.
For ./configure I'm fairly confident it would be possible to do this and remain compatible with POSIX.1-2001 "shell and utilities". (Little known fact: for a long time now, autoconf scripts *do* use shell functions! Internally, wrapped in multiple layers of M4 goo, but still — we haven't insisted on backcompat all the way to System V sh in a long, long time.) For Makefiles I believe it would be necessary to insist on GNU Make.
This would definitely be an improvement on the status quo, but would it be *enough* of one? And would it be less work than migration to something else? (It would be a compatibility break and it would *not* be possible to automate the conversion. Lots of work for everyone no matter what.)
On the subject of implementation language, I have one half-baked idea and one castle in the air.
The half-baked idea is: Suppose ./configure continues to be a shell script, but it ceases to be a *generated* shell script. No more M4. Similarly, the Makefile continues to be a Makefile but it ceases to be generated from Makefile.am. Instead, there is a large library of shell functions and a somewhat smaller library of Make rules that you include and then use.