On Thu, Sep 14, 2017 at 2:53 AM, Nemo <cym224@gmail.com> wrote:

On 12/09/2017, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote (in part):
> 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.

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).

N.