Re: [Libmesh-devel] Still Really Dislike Automake

[Roy S. <roy...@ic...>]

On Thu, 30 Aug 2018, Derek Gaston wrote:

> Maybe.  Certainly the "configure" that we have is really good... and
> that won't change.  It _may_ be possible to make them coexist for a
> bit.

I'd be much more open to experimentation if we can get things to
coexist; I've done that in the past with CMake-vs-autotools (aka
we-have-some-Windows-users vs this-works-better-for-everyone-else) on
another project and it was okay.  I don't know if it would be as
smooth with autotools-vs-autotools_minus_automake or if we'd have name
clash headaches, though.

> Hah - I do agree with having to build build-systems.

There doesn't yet seem to be a build system that doesn't suck, so it's
not *entirely* ridiculous to envision reinventing the wheel here.

Would it be better to try and figure out how to ameliorate the suck in
automake, though?  I don't mean to start a flame war but "the rebuild
scripts are too confusing" is a fair criticism and if the list of
other criticisms isn't too long or too foundational then we might be
able to reduce the damage.
---
Roy