On Sun, Apr 02, 2000 at 08:17:27PM +0200, Ralf S. Engelschall wrote:
> As I tried to convince us
> a few months ago, Autoconf is great, but _only_ if _not_ used in an
> ad-hoc approach.

*sigh* I asked for concrete advice from you, I didn't get it. If you
want something better than a newbie's autoconf setup, you have to find
a non-newbie willing to expend effort on it rather than just
complaining that it doesn't meet your high standards.

+1 on replacing the current setup with something far better. I agree,
it sucks.  It's a pain to follow even for me, since there have been so
many changes required in the past few months to get everything to
work, eliminate automake, and so on.

Unfortunately, +1ing something better is the easy part; writing it is
harder. It'll either have to be based on autoconf or written from
scratch. Last I checked, requiring Perl, or any non-standard packages,
on users' machines was out of the question.  And until the Software
Carpentry guys come through (assuming that their implementation
doesn't require Python on users' machines), there is nothing better
out there that I know of.