[Nix-dev] Depending on Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool

[Eelco Dolstra]

Hi,

On 07/07/12 09:55, Ludovic Courtès wrote:

> Golden Rule:
> 
>   Never ever add a dependency on Autoconf, Automake, or Libtool, unless
>   you’re confident that you cannot do otherwise at all.
> 
> The point of these tools is precisely that they don’t need to be present
> when installing from a tarball (unlike CMake, for instance.)
> 
> When a package’s build system needs to be patched, we must try hard to
> patch generated files, such as ‘Makefile.in’ or ‘configure’, to avoid
> having to depend on the autotools.

Patching generated files seems like a violation of some other Golden Rule :-)

Maybe a better solution, given the track record of the Autotools with respect to
backwards compatibility, is that packages should depend on a particular version
of the Autotools (e.g. "automake_1_11").  To encourage that we should remove the
"automake" and "autoconf" attributes from all-packages.nix.

-- 
Eelco Dolstra | LogicBlox, Inc. | http://nixos.org/~eelco/