Re: Re: Cygwin installation problem (Igor Gierymski)

Posted by Luigi Ballabio-2 on
URL: http://quantlib.414.s1.nabble.com/Re-Cygwin-installation-problem-Igor-Gierymski-tp3229p3237.html

On 2004.08.21 12:47, Daniel J. Duffy wrote:
> Life is easier if you don't have to use Makefiles!!

Daniel,
        life would be easier if there were a single platform :)
On Unix-like platforms, we're using the so-called GNU autotools  
(autoconf, automake and libtool) as they are, to date, the most  
complete answer to the problem of providing portability across  
different systems---proper unixes such as Solaris, Mac OS X, Linux on a  
number of processors besides x86...  The user can just uncompress the  
source tarball and type

./configure ; make

The configure step detects the current platform, checks for needed  
libraries and tools and automatically generates makefiles whose rules  
are aware of most (if not all) particular quirks of the platform. The  
configure script is itself automatically generated from the autotools,  
based on some info given by the developer (not much more than the list  
of source files.)

So it's not like we're maintaining Makefiles--as you suggest, that  
would be a _major_ headache...  we just have to keep the source list up  
to date, but that's no more difficult that adding new files to a VC++  
project.

Later,
        Luigi