It Seemed Like A Good Idea, At The Time

I had just about reached the limits of what was possible with just a makefile, but I still felt like adding more. So I rewrote the thing today as a shell script. Now, you simply call it as ‘./configure’, and it generates the Makefile for you. The script is still configured in much the same manner as the old Makefile, except now you don’t have to specify a compiler.

More importantly, the rewrite has allowed a whole bunch of new tricks, including:

• Command-line specification of the install prefix
• Now the commands are familiar to anyone who has ever done a “./configure && make && sudo make install” before
• Out of source builds are now implemented
• Autodetection of the C compiler

And most importantly:

• Plenty of room to grow

Unfortunately, the code took a major step backwards in attractiveness. Over the next few days I may tinker around with it in an attempt to make it not look quite so bad, and possibly move more logic out into the configure script.

Other major news of the day: I finally dumped bzr for git, just so I could use GitHub. The new project is named BashBuild.