[Vm-dev] platforms/unix/config/acinclude.m4

[Eliot Miranda]

Hi All,

    wouldn’t we be better off using flat makefiles for Linux platforms like the Mac and Windows which are parameterized with some sort of per-Linux-dialect “available libraries” file, instead of struggling to make this automatic work across platforms?  

If we go this route (and I strongly think we should) then we would have to 
- have a way of determining Linux dialects (uname is that means) and some pattern-matching facility to distil the various inane outputs Into names like (I suppose) redhat-6, manjaro-4 etc.
- have files like redhat-6.include in build.linux64x86/common et al that specify clearly what libraries we can expect and could include the package manager commands to make sure prerequisites are loaded

Tobias, it’s heroic of you to fix platforms/unix/config/acinclude.m4, and I appreciate the effort.  But platforms/unix/config/acinclude.m4 makes it extremely hard to ask questions such as “what sound plugins would be built on Linux dialect babel-17?” unless one is actually on Linux dialect babel-17.  IMO we need a declarative solution here.  We waste *huge* numbers of cycles on every Linux build running configured which, fingers crossed, and if one has remembered to install the package prerequisites, always produce the same answers, but those answers are not easily predictable in advance, and unobtainable except on the exact variant in question.  So what we have in the Unix autoconf system is slow opacity; the very opposite of fast clarity.  Why are we still fighting this crap after twenty five years?

_,,,^..^,,,_ (phone)