why autotools?

Discuss anything related to product development
Post Reply
lbook
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu Jun 11 2015 1:43 pm

why autotools?

Post by lbook »

I like the idea of CopperSpice very much, but I wonder why you have chosen Autotools. My sad experience with Autotools is as follows: when it works it's OK, but whenever something goes really wrong it's quite impossible to fix it except for the extreme Autotool expert - and becoming such an expert just takes too much time, it isn't worth it. And as far as I can see I'm not the only one to find Autotools extremely ugly. For me Autotools is a very strong argument against adopting Copperspice, and I imagine it might be for many others as well. So why? I can see why it's too late for Linux to change, but for you it shouldn't be too hard.
Best regards, lbook
ansel
Posts: 150
Joined: Fri Apr 10 2015 8:23 am

Re: why autotools?

Post by ansel »

Thank you for your input and your question. We have received a number of requests to investigate the possibility of supporting CMake and we are in the process of doing so for the straightforward build scenarios.

My experience of Autotools has been that it is the least bad option for complex cross-platform C++ projects. Every other build tool I have worked with has hard limitations that cannot be worked around. As an example, we want to allow for cross compiling CopperSpice . This requires the 'rcc' binary to be built twice, once for the host to use while compiling and once for installation on the target. This is very difficult to accomplish correctly in any build system, but Autotools seems to have the most mature support in this area.
Ansel Sermersheim
CopperSpice Cofounder
lbook
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu Jun 11 2015 1:43 pm

Re: why autotools?

Post by lbook »

Thanks! That's a very encouraging answer. Better than I had dare hope for.
smil3y
Posts: 8
Joined: Thu Jul 30 2015 5:01 pm

Re: why autotools?

Post by smil3y »

Hello,

It's probably better to open a new topic on this but I've done some work on CMake support in my personal fork[1] of the copperspice repo at GitHub in case you are interested. It is work-in-progress but most components build with the exceptions being CsMultimedia, CsDeclarative and CsWebKit (the last one not even tested) as far as I'm aware.

Due to my laptop being old the build time is quite long so I'm trying to setup automatic builds with the help of Open Build Service[2], I've got the basics done on that too but for some reasons (I think) gstreamer is not being installed at all[3].

Any help with testing and resolving issues is welcome, cheers!

[1] https://github.com/fluxer/copperspice
[2] http://openbuildservice.org/
[3] https://build.opensuse.org/package/live ... 3.2/x86_64
ansel
Posts: 150
Joined: Fri Apr 10 2015 8:23 am

Re: why autotools?

Post by ansel »

smil3y wrote:Hello,

It's probably better to open a new topic on this but I've done some work on CMake support in my personal fork[1] of the copperspice repo at GitHub in case you are interested. It is work-in-progress but most components build with the exceptions being CsMultimedia, CsDeclarative and CsWebKit (the last one not even tested) as far as I'm aware.
Wow! This is wonderful work, thank you for taking on this challenge and making what looks like a major stride toward CMake support in CopperSpice.

We will be taking a good look at your github repo shortly and we look forward to seeing how we can integrate your efforts into the CopperSpice project.
Ansel Sermersheim
CopperSpice Cofounder
smil3y
Posts: 8
Joined: Thu Jul 30 2015 5:01 pm

Re: why autotools?

Post by smil3y »

ansel wrote:
smil3y wrote:Hello,

It's probably better to open a new topic on this but I've done some work on CMake support in my personal fork[1] of the copperspice repo at GitHub in case you are interested. It is work-in-progress but most components build with the exceptions being CsMultimedia, CsDeclarative and CsWebKit (the last one not even tested) as far as I'm aware.
Wow! This is wonderful work, thank you for taking on this challenge and making what looks like a major stride toward CMake support in CopperSpice.

We will be taking a good look at your github repo shortly and we look forward to seeing how we can integrate your efforts into the CopperSpice project.
All working components can be succesfully build on Linux, I've not tested the build system on Mac or Windows so there may be some issues with those platforms but I'll happily address them if they are pointed out and there is someone that can test the changes.
Post Reply