Sometimes people wonder whether my blog is purely political and recreational, since I don’t often engage in technical matters with the same zeal as those other issues. Well, to these people, I proudly say: Fuck Automake! Fuck it, fuck the horse it rode in on, and fuck its little dog Libtool too! I’m not first to reach this conclusion either, in exactly those terms no less! Oh, and the same goes for putrid little Autoconf as well. Technical enough?

The whole steaming Automake/Autoconf/Libtool pile of GNU is anathema to end user-friendly binary compatibility and portable software in general. It’s a mess, a kludge, a hack. It gives the illusion of convenience and portability for small open-source projects, but all the while it’s sucking you deeper into maintenance and support hell. Want to write powerful, robust system level code? Not without a ton of impossible to maintain #ifdef‘s you won’t. Curious what your system library dependencies are? Good luck! Want to be able to recreate a particular build to reproduce a bug? Hope you can find the machine it was built on!

In case you’re curious about how this highly elegant system works, here’s the most simplistic diagram possible:

So, in conclusion, I think Automake is great… for me to poop on!