[Jasper_]

This becomes more complex when distributions want to patch configure.ac or Makefile.am -- they need to patch the included Makefile.in files as well.

Trying to balance these two forces is the reasoning behind the AM_MAINTAINER_MODE flag.

These days, I prefer to simply use git archive for a tarball and make users run autogen.sh themselves.

See https://blogs.gnome.org/desrt/2011/09/08/am_maintainer_mode-... and the associated comments.

[pdkl95]

Yes, incluinding the maintainer-mode option can be important, which is why this line should be included in configure.ac most of the time when using automake:

    AM_MAINTAINER_MODE([enable])

This includes the --disable-maintainer-mode configure option, while leaving maintainer mode on by default which is the traditional behavior you get when you don't include that macro. This shouldn't change any behavior for most projects.

You can change the default to off with the same macro, if that is important; the key point is to include the macro so it can be changed by the automated packaging scripts used in some distributions.

I recommend Autotools Mythbuster[1] for a nice overview of how to use modern versions of autotools, including maintainer mode[2].

[1] https://autotools.io/

[2] https://autotools.io/automake/maintainer.html

[voltagex_]

To the newcomer, autoconf looks really scary. Are there any good tutorials and are there clear advantages of using autoconf over CMake, waf, scons, ninja or other hipster-language-build-systems?

I'm going to start looking at CMake to build HTML and javascript based projects soon.

[ploxiln]

I consider myself rather adept with Makefiles for Gnu make, and I also find autoconf scary (I'll be checking out the "autotools mythbuster" linked above though).

I'd guess that autotools and cmake have a lot of complexity to do C/C++/libs related stuff that is inapplicable to html/js projects, and I'd suggest almost any of the others: waf, scons, plain make ...

ninja, as you've probably heard, is designed to be the backend to some other frontend which generates all the explicit dependencies and commands. That could be cmake, it could be a custom script of yours. Then ninja identifies changed files and runs an "incremental" build as fast (parallel and minimal) as possible.

Just btw, I wrote a from-first-principles sort of tutorial on Gnu make: http://www.ploxiln.net/make.html

[Shorel]

CMake has been a huge improvement over autoconf and over visual studio projects/solutions for me. I have a repeatable and multiplatform build system with CMake. Autoconf seems like the ugly and old bastard brother of CMake in comparison, and that's praising autoconf.

However I don't know if CMake is really the best fit to build html projects. In fact, I don't know what should be built about them... my composer scripts barely copy some JavaScript and CSS files to the public/assets folder, nothing fancy like what CMake has to do.

[varjag]

I found Klemens' _21st_Century_C_ has a decent intro to basic autoconf setup.