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

[Shea Levy]

On Jul 8, 2012, at 11:46 PM, Eelco Dolstra <eelco.dolstra at logicblox.com> wrote:

> 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.

+1. Is there ever a case where some nifty new autotools feature meaningfully changes a package other than going from broken->fixed or vice versa?

> 
> -- 
> Eelco Dolstra | LogicBlox, Inc. | http://nixos.org/~eelco/
> _______________________________________________
> nix-dev mailing list
> nix-dev at lists.science.uu.nl
> http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev