[gentoo-user] Re: is multi-core really worth it?

[Martin Vaeth]

David Haller <gentoo@×××××××.de> wrote:
> autotools is _by far_the best both from a users and a packagers view.

I do not agree. Its main advantage is that it is compatible with
most existing unix systems (but I am already not so sure whether
this also holds if you also want to compile for windows, powerpc,
etc.)

> cmake [...] qmake

I agree, these are horrible. The best build system currently
appears to be meson.

> equivalent to "./configure --help"

For meson, it is "cat meson_options.txt", and there is a clear
distinction between general options and project specific ones.

> transparent and easily hackable

Hacking autotools is a nightmare: Things are often hidden in
subprojects, sometimes combined with project specific hacks,
generating/updating necessary configure files somewhere within the
projects tree etc.
And after each change you have to run autoreconf, often with
compatibility problems of autoconf/automake/gettext/... versions etc.

With meson, there is an absolutely strict separation between
the distributed files and the generated/output files which are
always in a fresh dir (and thus are _always_ produced).
When hacking up, you need to modify only the *.meson files
and do not have to worry about re-generating any other data.

This sounds like I am a meson fanboy. I am not; actually, I dislike
a lot of its design decisions. But compared to autotools, cmake,
and qmake, it did a lot of things right.