i don't love the tone of this article but i agree with a lot of what it says about gnu automake. my experience with it in php was awful. it belongs in the dustbin of history https://felipec.wordpress.com/2024/04/04/xz-backdoor-and-autotools-insanity/

‪shell scripts are arcane enough when they're little things written in bash. automake is a massive shell script library written in m4‬

‪the thing about build scripts is that nobody cares about them. you write your project in c, c++, rust, whatever… some language you know well and enjoy using. but in order to actually configure/compile/link/package it, inevitably you need Some Other Language to help you‬

‪you don't care about the beauty of your build system. build systems are hell. you just want it to work. almost always the resulting code is far from beautiful. if it is readable and well-structured, it probably hasn't made contact with multiple platforms or configurations yet‬

‪so, build scripts are the kind of unloved, neglected code where bugs too easily hide. but i think we collectively make this worse for ourselves by writing this code in unloved languages we don't or can't fully understand. python is just about acceptable. but bash? that's arcane.‬

‪m4? that's on another level. yes, of course you should learn the language if you're going to use something that requires it. but automake is basically the only reason you'd ever have to learn m4. do you care enough to bother? i doubt it! i certainly don't!‬

‪this may be unpopular, but cmake's configuration language is also arcane in my opinion. my experience with reading its documentation trying to figure out what code does and how to do anything vaguely complex with it is only pain. but that's an aside. it's okay for simple projects‬

anyway:

• unloved code is bad
• unloved code in arcane languages is worse

therefore:

• gnu autotools must die
• please stop writing shell scripts
• we need better build systems

‪btw i don't really agree with the blog post that makefiles are better. i mean, a simple hand-written makefile is definitely better than endless lines of autogenerated shell scripts that in turn generate a very complex makefile, but i don't think they scale well‬