Re: [Tuxpaint-devel] [Fwd: Bug#300632: tuxpaint: FTBFS: Changed header files.]

[Ben A. <sy...@sa...>]

On Wed, 2005-03-23 at 15:40 -0500, Albert Cahalan wrote:
> You'd have to provide a specific example.

Sorry, nothing recent comes to mind, other than this particular bug.

I believe what I'm reacting to is of all of my packages that use SDL,
this is the only one that is broken, and my autotools-based packages
have in general been trouble-free, whereas the hand-rolled build systems
have given me the most trouble.  But I suppose it could fairly be said
that is upstream's problem for defining crappy names (they weren't
prefixed "SDL" originally, so namespace clashes were possible, which
they subsequently fixed,) and nothing to do with the build system we
use.  Reasoning from your perspective, my SDL-using autotools-based
packages get away with it not because autotools is superior, but because
they perform the same check a different way.  If upstream had changed
something different about their package, though, I can easily see the
autotools checks failing and our hand-rolled check succeeding.  It comes
down to luck.

Tuxpaint, however, has been relatively trouble free, thus far, so this
isn't a criticism levelled specifically at Tuxpaint.  I guess it is
possible to make a tight and well-crafted hand-rolled build that works
most of the time on most systems, it's just that very few people
actually do that.  I can imagine, though I have not seen it yet, that it
is also possible to make a horrible mess of a build system using
autotools.

Since I'm not doing the work, I don't have any say in whether Tuxpaint
should use autotools or not anyway.  I thought I saw an opportunity to
make Tuxpaint's build system more robust across a broad spread of
different platforms.  I guess I was mistaken.

Ben