[TUHS] Re: Version 256 of systemd boasts '42% less Unix philosophy' The Register

I agree that there are certainly times when CMake's leverage has solved problems for people. My most visceral reactions were mostly based on cases where no tool like CMake was really required at all, but CMake had wormed its way into the consciousness of new programmers who never learned make, and thought CMake was doing them a great service. Bugged the hell out of me, this dumbing-down of the general programming population. My bad experiences were all as a consultant to teams that needed a lot of expert help, when they had thrown CMake along with a lot of other unnecessary complexity into their half-working solutions. So I guess it was all tarred by the same flavor of badly conceived work. But then as I tried to make my peace with the CMake build as it was, I got a deeper understanding of how intrinsically irrational CMake is (and again, behavior changing on the same builds depending on CMake release versions. So there certainly are times when something a little more comprehensive, outside of make, is required. ./configure && make is not so bad, it's not irrational, sometimes it's overkill, but it works ... but only if the system is kind of Unix-y. If not you may wind up doing a lot of work to pretend it's more Unix-y, so instead of porting your software, you're porting it to a common Unix-like subset, then emulating that Unix-like subset on your platform, both ends against the middle. That can be ultimately counter-productive too. I have an emotional reaction when I see the porting problem become transformed into adherence to the "one true way", be it Unix, or one build system or another. Because you're now just re-casting the problem into acceptance of that other tool or OS core as the way it should be. Instead of getting your thing to work on the other platform, by translating from what your application wants, into how to do it on whatever system, you're changing your application to be more like what the "one true system" wants to see. You've given up control of your idea of your app's core OS requirements, you've decided to "just give in and be UNiX (or Windows, or whatever)". To me, that's backwards. On 06/20/2024 12:59 PM, Warner Losh wrote: For me, precomputing an environment is the same as a wysiwyg editor: what you see is all you get. If it works for you, and the environment that's inferred from predefined CPP symbols is correct, then it's an easy solution. When it's not, and for me it often wasn't, it's nothing but pain and suffering and saying MF all the time (also not Make File).... I was serious when I've said I've had more positive cmake experiences (which haven't been all that impressive: I'm more impressed with meson in this space, for example) than I ever had with IMakefiles, imake, xmkmf, etc... But It's also clear that different people have lived through different hassles, and I respect that... I've noticed too that we're relatively homogeneous these days: Everybody is a Linux box or Windows Box or MacOS, except for a few weird people on the fringes (like me). It's a lot easier to get things right enough w/o autotools, scons, meson, etc than it was in The Bad Old Days of the Unix Wars and the Innovation Famine that followed from the late 80s to the mid 2000s.... In that environment, there's one of two reactions: Test Everything or Least Common Denominator. And we've seen both represented in this thread. As well as the 'There's so few environments, can't you precompute them all?' sentiment from newbies that never bloodied their knuckles with some of the less like Research Unix machines out there like AIX and HP/UX... Or worse, Eunice... Warner On Thu, Jun 20, 2024 at 12:42 PM Adam Thornton <athornton(a)gmail.com> wrote: