2024-06-09 –, Altispeed (JR Ballroom )
All build engines are quicksand; the bigger more and elaborate ones suck more. Here's how to climb out.
GNU autoconf was, and is, a complexity disaster; because of it, the build recipes for large old projects are often unmaintainable nightmares. Several attempted replacements such as ScCons, SCons, waf, and CMake have failed to achieve their early promises for various reasons. How did we get into this mess, and how do we get out of it? In this talk, I will draw on painful experience in de-autoconfiscating major projects including GPSD and NTPsec, describe my struggles with heavyweight build systems, and explain why I think modern conditions make bare Makefiles a viable option again.
Wandering hacker, troublemaking anthropologist, maintainer of over a hundred open-source projects. If it weren't for me you probably wouldn't be at this conference.