[rescue] Has freshmeat.net disappeared forever? WAS:::Re: What to do with the SS20

[John Floren]

On Tue, Jun 24, 2014 at 3:42 PM, Richard <legalize at xmission.com> wrote:
> In article <20140624220805.GA46307 at galah.local>,
>     PAK <pakenned-list at pobox.com> writes:
>
>> Here's the joy of git--sometimes the effort needed to get something to
>> compile is simply "./configure && make && make install", [...]
>
> ...which, by the way, is *not* portable.

Ironic, that. Configure spends a whole bunch of time checking what
libraries you have and how the various functions in those libraries
work, how your /bin/ tools work, all that jazz, on the pretense that
as long as you have the correct libraries available, it should compile
anywhere.

But in my experience, it seems to often:

1. Fail to check for a dependency, so you fail in the make step (the
"All of our devs use Ubuntu" error)
2. Test for something the program doesn't actually need, causing
configure to fail (the "Autoconf is hard, we just used <other
project's> setup" error)
3. Make even bigger assumptions while trying to check a dependency. I
noticed this on Plan 9 because configure would often try to use "ls
-i" to check something, but Plan 9 doesn't really have the concept of
inodes.

This is because autotools are rubbish.

john