OpenBSD Journal

Attempt for an autoconf alternative

Contributed by jose on from the welcome-alternatives dept.

Damien writes: "If you're one of the people that autoconf makes crazy then you could be interested by the PMK project.

Its first goal was to provide a replacement that was more secure, faster and easier to use. But since the beginning some other features appeared in the package. For example, we are actually working on finishing our BSD alternative for pkg-config. At the same time there's also a work in progress on the compiler detection subsystem to get rid of libtool for shared library support.

That said, we are still far from the 1.0 requirements and even more since we added more features than expected. For more details about this project you're welcome to visit the project's website at: http://pmk.sf.net ."

It's BSD licensed, too.

(Comments are closed)

Comments

  1. By Damien () on

    And the most important is that the project is mainly developed on OpenBSD.

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward () on

      Why should that matter?

      Comments

      1. By Anonymous Coward () on

        As far as i know deadly is not the 'Tru64 journal' :)

        Comments

        1. By Martin Reindl () wildweasel@bsdcow.net on http://opn.bsdcow.net

          Funny that you said that, pmk is also halfway ready to work on Tru64. Not yet with the native Compaq C compiler, but should be ok with gcc :)

  2. By Rick Wash () rwash@citi.umich.edu on mailto:rwash@citi.umich.edu

    Does it replace automake too? Or does it integrate well with the BSD makefiles?

    Comments

    1. By Damien () on

      We do not have a replacement for automake and i doubt we'll ever have it in the future.
      To be honest we don't believe that generating makefiles automatically is a good thing.

  3. By ciph3r () on

    What about buildtool? http://buildtool.sourceforge.net/

    It's also BSD licensed and intended to be a replacement for "a clean replacement for the Autoconf, Automake and Libtool triplet".

    Comments

    1. By jmmv () jmmv@menta.net on http://buildtool.sourceforge.net/

      You missed that Buildtool also provides a simple and shell-based replacement for pkg-config. It even recognizes .pc files (in a limited way) so that you can use them w/o installing the GNU pkg-config utility.

      WRT all comments I read about automake, Buildtool initially provided BSD-like Makefiles (that is, an integrated pmake with several .mk files ready to be used by third party programs, like prog.mk, lib.mk, etc). It has lately been moving to a different build infrastructure, based on shell scripts, which IMO could drive to a better overall control of the build process of a program. The intention is that a shell script defines several variables, using shell functions to simulate targets, and then let Buildtool handle all system-specific details (library and program building, dependancy tracking, etc).

      Configure scripts are also shell based; they call functions provided by buildtool, instead of macros.

      Keep in mind that it never generates files, so you need it installed in the build system to build programs. This has advantadges (like that you can fix a problem in a central place, and let all packages benefit from it), but some disadvantadges (like requiring another small build dependancy). Check out the website, which contains more information, http://buildtool.sourceforge.net/ ;-)

      Have fun!

      Comments

      1. By Anonymous Coward () on

        You missed that Buildtool also provides a simple and shell-based replacement for pkg-config. It even recognizes .pc files (in a limited way) so that you can use them w/o installing the GNU pkg-config utility.

        Oh i wasn't aware you did that too. It sounds like you've read the pkg-config code too :)))
        Since i started internel support of pkg-config my only wish is to remove this program from all my boxes.

        My prefered chunk of code in pkg-config is:
        if (name)
        con->appName = strcpy(malloc(strlen(name) + 1), name);

    2. By Damien () on

      You can also count Scons and cmake as others alternatives.

  4. By ciph3r () on

    What about buildtool? http://buildtool.sourceforge.net/

    It's also BSD licensed and intended to be "a clean replacement for the Autoconf, Automake and Libtool triplet".

  5. By Wilbern () on

    There's also Csoft-MK (http://www.csoft-mk.csoft.org/), which includes an autoconf/automake replacement with support for concurrent builds.

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