Re: CFO: Why ./configure?

From: André Pönitz (poenitz_at_gmx.net)
Date: 09/15/03 

Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2003 10:11:15 +0000 (UTC)

wereHamster <tom@dbservice.com> wrote:
> in german there is proverb (sprichwort) which goes like this:
> 'jeder backt seine eigenen broetchen',
> translated to english it would be somthing like:
> 'everyone is coocking his own coockies/rolls',
> which means that everyone is making his own
> things/standarts/definitions/etc.
> perfectly suits to the compatibility between the different flavors of
> linux/unix. every system has different definitions/headers/syntax/etc.
> but why? linux/unix is even worser than windows? there is win95, win98,
> winnt, win200, winxp - five different systems. but there is redhat 6.x,
> redhat 7.x, redhat 8.x ,redhat 9.x and the same with HP-UX, AIX, apple,
> mandrake, SuSE, yellow dog, and many others and there are always some
> changes between the releases which makes it hard to develop a application.

You completely miss the point.

The world _is_ diverse, the world keeps changing. It has been like that,
it will be like that.

Instead of asking mankind to 'standardize' on FooOS 2004 with BarLibrary
2004 (which is totally impracticable for all kind of reason...) you
have to face the challenge and use a build process that handle different
environments gracefully.

The autotools are far from perfect, but they do a fairly decent job in
such a complex environment.

It is always a bit amusing to see people coming from a world where
'platform independence' means 'it runs on NT, 2000 and if you are
lucky and sacrify a black rooster even on XP' struggling with the idea
that a web browser is not necessarily called 'IE' and that one can
develop for completely different platforms without ever having physical
access to such beasts.

> based on gcc, but has different syntax. why? are they altering the
> gcc code so heavily that even '-shared' doesn't work? why? to balme
> the developers? i simply don't see any reason to change the syntax of
> an already working compiler.

There have been a few reason to extend the scope of gcc during the
last 16 years. Not the least of which is the appearance of new gaming
OSes from Redmond in the 90s [Sorry, could not resist ;-}]

Andre'

PS:

> somewhere i read that linus torvalds is against the posix standart.

Source for such a general statement?

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