Stats for nerds
2recommend
3mentions
2people
2021–2023years
100% recommend
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I bought this book on autotools a few years ago which demystified it a bunch.
https://www.amazon.com/Autotools-Practioners-Autoconf-Automa...
Basically all of the decisions are based on decades of trying to support ever more features, backwards compatibility, many different hackers trying to keep it working for their own projects / companies, etc.
It is possible to use autotools nowadays without losing your mind. There is a "safe" path where things just work. I prefer it to CMake, but both are unwieldy beasts.
- There is a really great book for everyone who seriously wants to learn autotools: Autotools: a practitioner's guide to GNU Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool / by John Calcote (2nd edition from 2020)
This is not specific to Autotools, but I like learning from well-structured books written by experts in its fields. The book provides a good path on how to handle this rather complex collection of tools without searching and jumping from one obscure internet resource to the other. And after a few hours of reading and experimentation, Autotools are not so unapproachable any more as the common preconception suggests. I agree with others that, once understood and the entry barrier removed, Autotools can be used quite pragmatically and are probably not harder to grasp as competitors in the field.
- I also highly recommend John Calcote's book "Autotools" from no starch press: https://nostarch.com/autotools2e
Probably the best technical book I bought in the last year. After the lecture, I have put aside all whispered-in prejudices and am convinced that it will still be worth betting on GNU autotools in the 2020s.
