@ng0 really I just want to kill automake because ugh

@ng0 I know lots of good people put effort into automake but a giant expanded pile of shell and makefiles is nuts to debug and the whole autotools system is so hard to learn

@ng0 it does mostly "just work" though... if someone else sets it up for you :P

@cwebber I think it's okay. Though I still have to find something that works similar to automake and is portable for most systems. I've been reading some older sources recently where the people simply kept up with some plan9 tools.

@cwebber I just made the perl based pkg-config from OpenBSD available for mostly my own experimental testing purposes. It works. I still need to compare and evaluate its usefulness. But, anything can be replaced and rewritten.

@cwebber One thing about perl, how deep does it go in the Linux based systems dependency tree? As far as I know it's required by some of the earliest tools, so it's basically a core package for Linux based systems, right?

@ng0 it's at least a core package for GNU because autotools

@cwebber Ah, right.

So if we can have that in perl, and the C pkg-config started put as SH tools, would it create a bootstrap problem if we'd write a pkg-config in Guile? Or it could be smaller Scheme.
I'm not sure if writing everything in Scheme is a good idea though, but it would be interesting.

@cwebber @ng0 I remember reading about one of the autotools embedding guile in a coming version

I don't remember if it was automake or some other tool

I can't find the toot anymore, of course

@catonano @ng0 make has guile support but I've never used it

@cwebber @ng0

I see

How is it supposed to be used ?

Can it spare me the ugly m4 macros in my config.ac files ?

How ?

The manual has an exampel but it's not very expressive

@catonano @ng0 I've heard that sadly it's not quite as powerful as it should be.

Honestly I'd still like to have a build DSL written in Guile that can either run as scheme or write out portable shell

@cwebber @ng0

Of course you'd prefer guile. Those m4 macros are a huge techical debt

Integrating java and clojure is way easier !

I made a Guile wrapper around Freexl. I used some m4 macros

But then Guile-git, g-golf and all those use different macros to do the same thing, I don't undertsand and that frustrates me

@cwebber @ng0

sorry for the rant 🙁

@catonano @ng0 yeah autotools overwhelms me

@cwebber @ng0

at least I'm not alone in this

@catonano @cwebber @ng0 No you are not!

Autotools group hug?

@sajith @cwebber @ng0

Now, for example, there' s no way that I can get Haunt to work on my Fedora workstation.

The Guix provided Haunt cant fins some scheme modules

If I check it out and build it it misses some other modules

And of course the macros in Haunt config.am are different than the ones I found in guile-git, guile-crypt, g-golf... 😞

@sajith @cwebber @ng0

Ok I solve dit

I was somewhat an idiot 🙄

@catonano @cwebber @ng0 You're not alone in that either! I feel like an idiot all the time. :-)

@clacke
@cwebber
Matthias and Matthew, and also all the unpaid students hammering away at Northeastern, Brown, UChicago, etc.!

(That's how I have commits in there.)

@mikeburns @clacke @cwebber
Thank you to all of the unpaid students who don't get enough credit!