Comparisons

As you have probably deduced, Buildtool is inspired in the most common GNU auto development tools: Autoconf, Automake and Libtool. In this section we will see a list of differences between the two set of tools.

This text is extracted from Buildtool's manual.

• Buildtool is BSD licensed, while auto tools are GPL licensed.
• Buildtool is a well integrated set of tools, while auto tools are all independant. This warrants that all parts of Buildtool work perfectly with each other. Some of the auto tools can be used isolated. Instead, when you use Buildtool you will almost always want to use all the provided tools to make your packages more integrated.
• Auto tools need to generate huge files to work. For example, Autoconf generates a configure script, while Automake generates real Makefiles. These files can become extremely big, and you have to download them over and over again, with each package. Around 10% of package's size is destinated to these tools. Buildtool does not do this: package configuration scripts and Makefiles are small, very small, and they do not need any kind of pre-processing.
• As auto tools pregenerate files, the end-user is not required to have the tools installed in his system because the packages can usually work alone (but if you need to tweak them, you are lost as you need the tools). Instead, you are required to install Buildtool to build any Buildtool-ized package. You may think that this is a disadvantadge, but not really. When you want to build programs in your system, you usually must have several tools, like a make program, a C compiler, other third-party tools (like Perl), etc. Do you really mind installing just another, little, one? The answer is no.
• Auto tools pollute the environment, by defining lots of variables. These variables may collide with your own ones and cause difficult to track side effects. Buildtool solves this by defining all variables and macros in their own namespace; private variables are also ``scoped''.