[Coin-lpsolver] Autoconf

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Mon, 20 Jun 2005, Jean-Sebastien Roy wrote:

> Kyle Ellrott wrote:
>> I'm curious, is there any over riding reason why COIN isn't built with
>> an autoconf/automake/libtool based system?

The main reason is that we don't have any volunteers with the expertise 
and time to build a proper set of scripts.  We do plan to get there 
eventually.

Now, if you do have the time and the expertise, and you'd like to 
volunteer...

>
> As I'm only a COIN user, I don't know why it does not use autoconf and co., 
> but the current build system is, in my view, faster, much easier to 
> understand, adapt and debug than the thousand lines of shell script and m4 
> used in the autotools.

Of course, some of the slowness is related to robustness, as there can be 
a large number of system tests and steps carried out in autotools that we 
don't do in the makefiles.  Makefiles (at least as ours are currently 
configured) can require a substantial amount of human intervention to get 
to work properly in different environments.

>
> I have to maintain a few softwares that use autotools: when it works out of 
> the box, it is fine; but when it does not, it is hell.

Agreed, and we don't want to do it if we can't do it well, for exactly 
this reason.

>
> Of course, this is only my humble experience, and I perfectly understand the 
> autotools can sometimes be useful.
>
> Regards,
>
> js



-- 
 		Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs