I can’t say I love autotools… I don’t. But I much prefer autotools to broken and messy manually-created buildsystems which you must ask them where you’re building, or what you want to use. libtool is an hell, many times broken, leaves .la around making your lib directories a mess, but it works.
Find me another build system that have the same features autotools has, like autotest for headers or for libraries, user-friendly parameters, support for prefix, CHOST handling and crosscompile help, and I’ll start using that.
In the mean time ncurses gave me an headache, because today after upgrading to 5.5 version, neither /bin/ls worked anymore on Gentoo/FreeBSD. The reason? ncurses uses the full version as soname… this means that 5.4 and 5.5 have different soname, and breaks. I worked that around creating a symlink libncurses.so.5.4 and now I’m working to get ncurses to use a decent soname… if that works fine I’ll commit in Gentoo/ALT overlay and then ask vapier to commit it.
This also means that I have to prepare a new stage to avoid new users to encounter this problem… and this is a stage to redo basically from scratch as most of it needs to be reinstalled… sob…
I’ll take the chance to fix a few more things that needed a bit of attention, too.
Scons dude, its the future.
I sincerely hope bksys and all the work on KDE4 will improve it (it’s likely, as that would mean having a lot of hackers working on a build system with a decent upstream, so usually good things come up on that).At the moment, tho, scons has quite a few limitations, mainly due to the missing automated checks or the difficult pkg-config integration.