[SDL] Makefiles vs autoconf for SDL (Was: Re: Autotoold)

[Mattias Engdegård]

"Mark K. Kim" <markslist at cbreak.org> wrote:
>Okay... I feel really behind for writing my own makefiles...  I've been
>putting off learning automake/autoconf because I haven't had the time to
>learn all the test conditions and stuff.

Don't use autoconf unless you have a *good* reason to. For SDL games,
autoconf is not as important as with free-standing games since SDL already
contains most of the platform-independent stuff. Basically all that's
needed is to say where SDL can be found; sdl-config helps a great deal.

A well-written and commented Makefile can be simple and easy to use. I
generally have a lot more trouble with badly written configure scripts. As
an example, of the winning entries in the recent contest, the by _far_
easiest to build and run was Bill Kendrick's Vectoroids, which had a
single, short Makefile.

And this was on a plain normal RedHat box; on a more exotic system, the
difference would have been even greater.