July 2010
Intermediate to advanced
360 pages
11h 12m
English
About the only time it makes sense not to use the Autotools is when you're writing software that will only run on non-Unix platforms, such as Microsoft Windows. Although the Autotools have limited support for building Windows software, it's my opinion that the POSIX/FHS runtime environment embraced by these tools is just too different from the Windows runtime environment to warrant trying to shoehorn a Windows project into the Autotools paradigm.
Autotools support for Windows requires a Cygwin[2] or MSYS[3] environment in order to work correctly, because Autoconf-generated configuration scripts are Bourne-shell scripts, and Windows doesn't provide a native Bourne shell. Unix and Microsoft tools are just different ...