[Gllug] Bison question

[Tethys]

Pete Ryland writes:
>"Yet Another" to add to the list..

It's already on my todo list, and has been for some time.

>Umm.. I don't want to be a killjoy or anything and I know
>autoconf/automake (and libtool!) are pains in the bum, but why start
>again from scratch? Why not improve on the existing tools which have
>good rationalisations for existance?

Make is essentially very sound. All it really needs is updating to take
account of the fact that Java broke the 1:1 mapping between source and
object files that had existed since the dawn of time. D'oh!

Automake, however, is fundamentally flawed by design. It assumes you can
infer certain thing by just looking at what you get when you #include
certain header files. Unfortunately, this will never be a reliable way
to find out what a system supports. The *only* way to do that is to
compile and link a program that makes use of those features. This is
actually just a case of being overfeatured. Remove AC_EGREP_HEADERS,
and force the use of AC_TRY_COMPILE instead, and automake becomes much
more sane.  Actually, my biggest gripe with automake is that they've
made the user interface for the generated configure script a thing of
beauty. But they forgot to do the same for the user interface seen by
the developer, which frankly sucks...

Tet

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