Re: [AD] build process overhaul

[Evert Glebbeek <eglebbk@xxxxxxxxxx>]

About the build system, I think there's something to be said for an 
established and common system. I think that means autotools.
Personally, I don't have much against the way the current configure script 
works, though it could all be a lot more consistent and `clean'.

> #1 Dependency generation under unix (all those misc/dep* sed scripts) is
> error prone and slow (24 seconds to run "make depend" here, compared to
> 9 seconds running "make depend" when cross-compiling to mingw, where gcc
> is used instead of sed).

We should be able to use gcc instead of sed under *nix, shouldn't we?

> #2 Use of "make depend" itself is error prone, automatic dependencies
> are much better. I don't want to know how often I hunted phantom bugs
> caused by forgetting make depend.

Yes, but I do like the ability to regenerate dependencies manually.

> #3 It is hard to add configure checks due to use of m4. Maybe someone
> thinks it is an easy to use language, but I doubt it.

I think it's horribly confusing, but I also think that Allegro's 
configure.in and aclocal scripts make it worse than it has to be.

> #4 Platform dependence, i.e. we have separate makefiles for each
> platform/compiler. (E.g. getting the split demo to compile again
> everywhere took several iterations because of that.)

I'm not sure I think this really is a problem, but maybe it needs to be 
done better. For my own projects, I used to just have one Makefile for 
everything. Recently, I split it up into a makefile.lst (similar to 
Allegro's), seperate include files for each platform (for setting up 
variables and things like that) and a skeleton makefile that includes all 
the special rules and targets.
Feels about right to me.

Evert