14 Sep
2017
14 Sep
'17
11:35 a.m.
On Thu, Sep 14, 2017 at 2:53 AM, Nemo <cym224(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 12/09/2017, Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote
(in part):
I also wept a bit when reading this. I once built gnome from source (don't
ask why), on Solaris, IRIX, and HP-UX. That was also the month I learned
how to use "autoconf" and "libtool" as swearwords...
But on modern Linux? That's not my experience. Maybe we just have different
standards for "just works", but a typical "modern" open source
project
nowadays "just works" (for my definition of just works) on pretty much any
modern system including FreeBSD (type: ./configure; make && make install).
And it worked. Back at that time every open
source (or closed source but
sent around) project had makefiles that "just worked" on Sun machines.
MIPS? Well that's IRIX, yeah, you need to do this or that. On a Sun?
It just worked.
Oh, I nearly wept when I read this. Building a typical project
nowadays is so painful -- the makefile works on one particular Linux
distro and woe betide the rest.
N.