[Gllug] Bison question

[rich at annexia.org]

Well I don't want to claim that I'm even going to do this - I'm
just messing around after all (and why not?).

The very practical issue for me is that I maintain something like
10 separate free & non-free packages. Each package has:

* configure.in
* Makefile.am (multiple, recursion being considered harmful of course)
* xyz.spec.in
* debian/*
* a website
* a changelog
* CVS control files

Take these and multiply by 10 and you'll begin to see exactly what
a pain in the posterior it is to maintain consistent packages. It
takes me the best part of two hours to upload the whole c2lib -> monolith
toolchain, in source, RPM and deb formats. And that's just for a release,
which is mostly automated by arcane scripts. There's plenty of room for
error when I forget to update some random debian file (say) and then
I discover that some file didn't make it to part of the release.

Add to this the fact that I now truly and honestly believe that libtool
has been placed on earth to punish me for sins that I must have committed
in a former life ...

There's really no reason why all of these different files need to exist,
and couldn't be auto-generated from a single master file which hides
all the nasty details.

And the really scary thing is that I, probably like many others, only need
about 10% of the features of autoconf - for instance, I never build on
anything other than Linux, believing that basically Solaris is obsolete
and *BSD users are smart enough to fix stuff themselves.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Red Hat Inc. (London, UK) http://www.redhat.com/software/ccm
http://www.annexia.org/ Freshmeat projects: http://freshmeat.net/users/rwmj

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