{"id":1877,"date":"2010-03-31T07:38:16","date_gmt":"2010-03-31T11:38:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=1877"},"modified":"2014-03-22T07:12:34","modified_gmt":"2014-03-22T11:12:34","slug":"autotools-must-die","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=1877","title":{"rendered":"Autotools must die"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Me, on the GPSD mailing list:<\/p>\n<p>Once upon a time, I did not hate autotools. Yea verily, it was the morning of the world and all things (even autotools) seemed fresh and new).  I&#8217;d say this innocence lasted until about, oh, 1995.<\/p>\n<p>But autotools was a kluge.  And it did accrete kluges and crocks around it, adding layers of complexity until it became sore difficult to tell which end was up.  And lo, it became a festering pile of special cases and obscure semi-documented rules, leading to a combinatorial explosion of unplanned interactions and obscure lossage.<\/p>\n<p>Like, say, the fact that our make check insists on running gps-makeregress  twice and in spite of being a genuine autotools <i>expert<\/i> with <i>fifteen years<\/i> of experience bear-wrestling the sorry fscker <i>I cannot figure out why it is doing this<\/i>. <\/p>\n<p>Oh, there&#8217;s a reason, all right.  And if I were willing to quintuple the three hours I just spent poking at our build setup I&#8217;m sure I could find it.  But that was three hours <i>wasted<\/i> as far as solving any real problem was concerned. Life is too short for such nonsense.<\/p>\n<p>Autotools has reached the Chandrasekhar mass limit of software and become a black hole of suck that consumes endless hours of bright peoples&#8217; time without any good result. It is well past time for it to die.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Me, on the GPSD mailing list: Once upon a time, I did not hate autotools. Yea verily, it was the morning of the world and all things (even autotools) seemed fresh and new). I&#8217;d say this innocence lasted until about, oh, 1995. But autotools was a kluge. And it did accrete kluges and crocks around&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=1877\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Autotools must die<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[32],"class_list":["post-1877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software","tag-gpsd","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1877"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1877\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2197,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1877\/revisions\/2197"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}