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

In general, in my experience, autoconf makes for less portability, not more.

The slurm configure, produced by the configure script, is 1 mbyte, 30,000 lines of impenetrable script. For each .c file in slurm, an 11960 line libtool script is invoked. autoconfig uses m4. When I told Eric Grosse, back in 2015, that *anything* still used m4, he would not believe it was "the m4 from the 70s" until I showed him. He was speechless. He had assumed m4 died in the 80s. Personally, the autoconfig process does not fill me with confidence, and it was recently responsible for a very serious security problem. And, autoconfig doesn't work: I've lost track of how many times autoconf has failed for me. In general, in my experience, autoconf makes for less portability, not more. For a good example of a very portable system with a very clean, human-readable make setup, I'd recommend a look at plan9ports. It includes 2 window managers, 2 graphical editors, and all the Plan 9 tools, and somehow manages to be at least as portable as the autoconf mechanism. On Thu, Jun 20, 2024 at 12:59 PM Warner Losh &lt;imp(a)bsdimp.com&gt; 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 &lt;athornton(a)gmail.com&gt; > wrote: > >> >> >> Someone clearly never used imake... >> >> >> There's a reason that the xmkmf command ends in the two letters it >> does, and I'm never going to believe it's "make file". >> >> Adam >> >> On Thu, Jun 20, 2024 at 11:34 AM Greg A. Woods &lt;woods(a)robohack.ca&gt; >> wrote: >> >>> At Thu, 20 Jun 2024 01:01:01 -0400, Scot Jenkins via TUHS < >>> tuhs(a)tuhs.org&gt; wrote: >>> Subject: [TUHS] Re: Version 256 of systemd boasts '42% less Unix >>> philosophy' The Register >>> > >>> > "Greg A. Woods" &lt;woods(a)robohack.ca&gt; wrote: >>> > >>> > > I will not ever allow cmake to run, or even exist, on the machines I >>> > > control... >>> > >>> > I'm not a fan of cmake either. >>> > >>> > How do you deal with software that only builds with cmake (or meson, >>> > scons, ... whatever the developer decided to use as the build tool)? >>> > What alternatives exist short of reimplementing the build process in >>> > a standard makefile by hand, which is obviously very time consuming, >>> > error prone, and will probably break the next time you want to update >>> > a given package? >>> >>> The alternative _is_ to reimplement the build process. >>> >>> For example, see: >>> >>> https://github.com/robohack/yajl/ >>> >>> This example is a far more comprehensive rewrite than is usually >>> necessary as I wanted a complete and portable example that could be used >>> as the basis for further projects. >>> >>> An example of a much simpler reimplementation: >>> >>> >>> http://cvsweb.NetBSD.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/external/mit/ctwm/bin/ctwm/Makefile… >>> >>> -- >>> Greg A. Woods &lt;gwoods(a)acm.org&gt; >>> >>> Kelowna, BC +1 250 762-7675 RoboHack &lt;woods(a)robohack.ca&gt; >>> Planix, Inc. &lt;woods(a)planix.com&gt; Avoncote Farms &lt;woods(a)avoncote.ca&gt; >>> >>