Autoconf

Raised as a usability problem by 15 people on Hacker News over 15 years (2010–2024), in 13 threads.

People raised many different problems with Autoconf, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 15 complaints

Getting builds to work with many library combinations is a major pain for users2024-04-04
Autoconf is very hard to get right, and few people use it effectively2024-04-04
Hard to understand; generated files are unwieldy and full of irrelevant content2024-04-04
Impossible to debug when the build configuration fails2024-04-02
Error messages didn't make clear that file modification times were the cause2023-12-27
Build configuration is confusing and opaque, hard for a sysadmin to change2023-10-24
Static build options are accepted but pkg-config is not told to use --static, causing failures2023-01-18
Sitting through an hour of autoconf is painful; patching configure scripts takes hours2021-09-04
Easy to misuse so --disable-foo actually enables foo2021-09-01
Automatic library finding is complex and gets in the way of package maintainers2020-10-23
Hard to use, bloated, slow and obtuse for developers2016-01-31
Stale caches mean edits to M4 scripts silently have no effect, costing hours of debugging2012-08-21
Obtuse and painful to use, making it hard to learn from good examples2012-06-13
Autoconf is very confusing to use and hard to understand2010-07-29
Errors surface only as opaque shell parse errors; debugging requires running configure with sh -x2010-07-09