[Zlib-devel] zlib 1.2.4.2 ready for its close up

[William A. Rowe Jr.]

On 4/10/2010 8:55 PM, Cosmin Truta wrote:
> Alon, I don't want to start a flame war. In all honesty, the autotools
> are much more mature than cmake, so chances to run into trouble with
> the autotools are lesser and lesser these days, and the same cannot
> yet be said about cmake, which is still a young product. Besides,
> cmake isn't any more user-friendly than the autotools, as you need to
> know magic incantations for both.

No flaming, but that is really not true.  There are major breaking changes
in each iteration of autoconf, so the hack that worked may no longer work
correctly for autoconf 2.65, while the order of macros have been switched
around and regularly cause larger projects some headaches.  Even the way
dependent subprojects could be passed their autoconf args was broken in
the past couple years.

This isn't so much an issue for zlib, where the autoconf decisions would
be truly minimal, but 'it's mature and stable' is something of a myth.
The tools continue to be 'improved', revised and evolving.