[geeks] What is going on with the open source community ...the stupid bastards are clueless

[Michael C. Vergallen]

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Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
| On Sun, 27 Apr 2008, Michael C. Vergallen wrote:
|
|> A starting to wonder why the Open Source developers are so enamoured
|> with the use of libtool, automake & autoconf.
|
| Automake and autoconf aren't really all that bad (aside from their use
| of m4).  They solve a very real problem in a needlessly kludgy[0] way.
| However, they solve it in a less kludgy way than most other attempts to
| solve that particular problem.  All of them are, of course, a poor
| substitute for actually porting code to a new platform and centralizing
| features in a way that allows for make to DTRT just by knowing uname and
| what features the person building the package wants.
| However, when you're time-constrained, sometimes a poor substitute is
| better than not supporting a particular platform at all.
True...
| So....it builds fine "the normal" way, which is presumably from the
| source tarball (which has the automake/autoconf/libtool cruft in it) but
| not from pkgsrc?  How is this an autotools problem?
|
No ...only pkgsrc uses libtool to try and build the package where the
original  authors strongly advice against using it. The NetBSD poeple
are trying to so-called stream-line the build proces by forcing the use
of libtool  on all packages in the build tree. You can see the
consequences a mile off when you try to build on Solaris the thing just
shits it self & dies on jotland parade. Also by using not just one
Makefile but they use their famous include directives on the Makefile
even when you turn a feature off it can still try to rear its head in
a underlying include. That makes trying to build a package like cups a
pain in the behind... I build it from the original tarbal code & it
worked because when I used pkgsrc it barfed on the kerberos code it
tried to use... on solaris you better not use the heimdal code but the
cdode included with solaris,then I tried to find where they included the
kerberos stuff but is was not in the makefile itself but in one of their
includes, when I found this I also found that the simple mention of
USE_LIBTOOL=no was not enough to disable it you actually had to totally
remove the line by commenting it out to get the code to build without
barfing..you also had to change a few other options also just to get the
stuff to work.

|> Also when you tell them they don4t use pointers in the right
|> way...they imsult you like you are a stupid bastard. They jsut write
|> their code in a bad way and because it works for them with gcc they
|> think it works on every system.
|
| Oh don't get me started on that.  "All the world runs gcc" has caused me
| more than enough grief on Solaris, IRIX, and AIX for one lifetime.
| Sadly, companies like Sun, eager to have their platform (and toolchain)
| work with every poorly-written piece of g-ware out there, rather than
| investing the time and effort in submitting patches to these packages to
| make the work on compilers that take a less liberal approach to
| following the ISO C standards, have made their -compilers- less
| rigorous.
|
Yep thats the porblem allright.. but they still have not made their
compiler stupid enough to compile stuff like gnome,.. You allmost have
to close your eyes when you compile that code these days...just to
ignore the warnings the compiler gives because they even dont use
strict-aliasing anymore....seems to be to difficult.


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