[saurik]

FWIW, my mileage definitely varied: autotools--which is quite easy if you bother to learn how it works and is then almost infinitely flexible--has pretty much never failed me (I think there was one incident for a while related to building stuff for iOS? regardless this was fixed long ago), but I have had to file and participate in a number of bugs on cargo, most of which are still open :/, and I haven't even developed anything in Rust myself yet... I've merely tried to compile and use stuff other people wrote and run into myriad ridiculous problems.

[diarrhea]

> quite easy if you bother to learn how it works

A timeless tautology.

Some things just are easy and pleasant. Caddy server, Cargo, ripgrep come to mind. Some things are easy only once you've learned them. No kidding!

[sanderjd]

We'll just have to agree to disagree about autotools :) But I feel like I did try to bother to learn how it works, but nonetheless failed, and I think you're right that it is almost infinitely flexible, but I think that is not a good thing.

Agreed that cargo has bugs and I hope it improves over time (granted: it is not at all new). But say what you want about cargo, at least it's an ethos!

[faitswulff]

> I've merely tried to compile and use stuff other people wrote and run into myriad ridiculous problems.

Which ones gave you trouble?

[bjourne]

Try getting autotools to work on Windows. Then try getting it to compile with Visual Studio. Then try getting it to cross-compile 32-bit binaries on a 64-bit system. If you aren't bald already I promise you'll tear your hair out.

[gilcot]

windows…

[zanellato19]

Which system do you use that cargo failed to compile? On Linux and Mac I have never had anything fail to compile for me with it.

[predictabl3]

lol, as a distro package maintainer, I've literally stopped packaging and stopped using software that uses autotools. Given me meson or give me a software compiled in a respectable language, or preferably, death. I'd take cargo and its crates.io namespace warts every day over autotools, and twice on every day of the week.