Products · Product
GNU Autotools
Raised as a usability problem by 12 people on Hacker News over 11 years (2012–2022), in 10 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Generated build file interdependencies are nearly impossible to understandUnreviewed
20122026- Interdependencies between generated build files are nearly impossible for people to understand2022-05-02
- Confusing chain of build commands and arguments; trial and error is easier than understanding it2019-09-04
- Build tooling requires hours of figuring out old versions, parallel-make bugs, and polluted diffs2012-11-14
Configure step takes far longer than compiling, wasting timeUnreviewed
20122026- Configure scripts take half an hour on Windows with antivirus, wasting developer time2022-05-02
- Configure step takes far longer than compiling, wastes the user's time2018-07-11
- Configure script is slow, opaque, hard to understand, and badly designed2016-08-09
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 12 complaints
- Interdependencies between generated build files are nearly impossible for people to understand2022-05-02
- Configure scripts take half an hour on Windows with antivirus, wasting developer time2022-05-02
- Changing Makefile.am forces rerunning autoreconf and configure, wasting developer time2022-05-02
- Hard to learn good practices and deprecated features; poor discoverability2021-03-31
- Confusing chain of build commands and arguments; trial and error is easier than understanding it2019-09-04
- Configure step takes far longer than compiling, wastes the user's time2018-07-11
- Configure script is slow, opaque, hard to understand, and badly designed2016-08-09
- Autotools is hard to maintain and unusable outside Unix-like platforms2015-06-09
- Build fails with unhelpful errors that don't say which dependency is missing2014-03-11
- Fixing build failures in configure and make is very hard to do2013-12-10
- Syntax is so opaque that people copy-paste configuration files without understanding them2013-02-25
- Build tooling requires hours of figuring out old versions, parallel-make bugs, and polluted diffs2012-11-14