I had a teeny pet project using GNU assembly that was going to target two platforms.
Instead of keeping my handwritten worst-practices Makefile I decided to try GNU Autotools for the educated reasons of:
- Text scrolling by looks pretty
- Vague memories of
./configuremakemake installtarballs
I got hit with mysterious macro errors, recompile with -fPIE errors (didn’t need this before?), autotools trying to run gcc on a .o file w/ the same options as an .s file, “no rule for all:”, and other things a noob would run into. (I don’t need a bugfix, since my handspun Makefile is “working on my machine” with uname -m.) So there’s a bit of a learning curve here, inhibited by old documentation and more quietly, genAI being shittier than normal in this department
With this I ask:
Do people still use Autotools for non-legacy stuff? If not, what do people choose for a new project’s build system and why?
edit: trimmed an aside
nah, but storage is cheap bro, you really should just buy another hard drive! don’t even think about going below 4 TB, of course!
/s