So long, autotools

Today I’ve found out that silene, one of the Wesnoth developers, has taken the decision to withdraw support for autotools (a.k.a. autoconf+automake, or configure + Make) without previous warning or discussion with the rest of the development team and distribution packagers.

Author: silene <silene@xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date:   Mon Dec 27 11:10:54 2010 +0000

    Discontinued support for building with autotools.
    Since r48086, wesnoth no longer builds (due to duplicate strings), and it would be a lot of work to fix the build system, so better drop it.

    git-svn-id: svn+ssh://svn.gna.org/svn/wesnoth/trunk@48092 xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx

This came completely out of the blue, as you can see. I can’t really say whether I agree with this decision or not, however, in an ideal world it would not have been done without previous discussion in the developers mailing list at the very least.

Although I’ve spoken in the past against SCons (blah), it is my preferred build system nowadays thanks to its ease of use, simple management of multiple build configurations and loonycyborg’s hard work on improving our build scripts.

This is just one of the many upcoming changes in Wesnoth 1.9.4, but one substantial enough to require some previous preparation for those who are used to the good old configure script. Hopefully this will not be a too disruptive change for our users, but in case you feel profoundly affected by the decision, now you know who to complain to. 😉