In the last round I wanted to replace everything with a lua implementation. Today, I want to take a step back and only replaces the autotools :)

On one side this follows the idea of cmake a bit more and on the other side it takes in account that make is isn't the evil guy here. Let make do the make job, let lua generate the makefile.

Ok, to put it in other words: we don't care who is building our code in the end. May it be Prime Mover, gnu make or nmake on windows.

It turns out that this task is more tricky in the end. Especially if you are crazy and want to build it Makefile.am files. Yes, the Makefile.am from automake as input to generate the Makefile. For now I go the route of a central Makefile that has everything (somewhat following the "Recursive Makefile considered Harmful" paper).

Let's see how much this hurts.

This is not a HOWTO, but more a RFC. I'm in the need for a portable, fast build-system. For lighttpd, for MySQL Proxy, ...

I need what autotools + gmake do, just in a portable (yes, including windows) and fast way. Up to now I tried SCons and cmake as alternatives and both fell short in important categories (like make dist).

If you are reading this blog since a while you know what comes next: Let's write a full replacement in LUA.

Requirements

I like what the autotools (automake, autoconf and libtool) do. From the users point of view it is:

$ ./configure ...
$ make 
$ make install

With automake you also get:

$ make uninstall
$ make dist
$ make distcheck

Especially the distcheck target is very neat if you are a packager and …