General FAQ

FAQ index:

1. About the foundation of PMK
2. PMK and Autoconf
3. Miscellaneous

FAQ content:

1. About the foundation of PMK
• Why choosing the name 'PMK' ?

Historically the first name of this project was premake (this is why you can find premake.h in the sources). But when trying to get an account on sourceforge this name was already taken by another project (yes i confess i've not done any search before choosing the name). So the name was changed to PMK. You will told me that pmk is also taken by Pair Master Key and i'll reply that PMK is the abbreviation of "Pre Make Kit".

• Why releasing the code under the BSD license ?

This license was chosen because it represent the best solution for free and open source in the founder's perspective. This is not a political assertion, it's just personal opinion.

2. PMK and Autoconf
• What is the problem with autoconf ?

The simpliest answer could be that if you have no problem with autoconf then PMK is not intended for you.
That said, some people (like us) don't like autoconf for many reasons (ever heard about "autoshit" nickname ?). For those people we try to provide PMK as an alternative.

• Autoconf produces shells scripts that does not need any dependency. Isn't it a weak point of PMK ?

the portability of the configure script is a myth since you start using it on anything else than a Linux distribution. I have no need to prove this assertion and if you don't believe it then just take a look at any BSD ports tree to be convinced. Many configure scripts does not work out of the box so there is a need to rebuild it from configure.in (and sometimes configure.in even needs to be edited to work). The conclusion is that in real word Autoconf is also a dependency just like PMK is.

• Does PMK support the same platforms as autoconf ?

No because since the beginning pmk was designed for POSIX systems. Check the STATUS file for currently supported platforms. We try to support most available Unix and Unix-like operating systems.

• Do you think that PMK will replace Autoconf ?

That's not the goal of PMK, we just provide an alternative for those who are not satisfied with Autoconf (and if PMK does not fit your needs too we also provide links to other alternatives in our links section).

• Do you provide something similar to AC_TRY_RUN ?
No. We have been asked for such feature but this is the opposite of pmk's goals. Running "wild" code during the configure stage could be a great security breach. Several solutions had been studied to permit execution of this code in a safe way but none were meeting our goals. So as far as there is no such solution we'll not provide a feature like AC_TRY_RUN.
3. Miscellaneous
• Do you plan to make PMK running under windows ?

We don't have any plan actually, PMK was POSIX oriented since the beginning. We also want to keep this project as simple as possible so a specific port of PMK is the best solution for each kind of platform. Now if someone want to port PMK to windows: just contact us !

• Why not supporting Cygwin ?

Because we found that Cygwin was not handling executable files as it should. We think it's absurd to have to take care about a trailing '.exe' under a Unix-like environment.
Support could eventually come back when Cygwin will behave as a real POSIX system.