20 Jun
2024
20 Jun
'24
1:07 p.m.
On 20 Jun 2024, at 16:37, Alexis
<flexibeast(a)gmail.com> wrote:
George Michaelson <ggm(a)algebras.org> writes:
Which brings us back to imake (at least in xmkmf form), where if the pre-prepared settings
matched your system, you were good and if not, you had a heap of work to set all the magic
variables to have it build correctly.
On classic MacOS, otoh, you’d compile against an SDK, but for each ROM/library symbol you
wanted to use you were expected to check at runtime if it existed, and if not, switch to
some alternative behaviour.
Autoconf was somewhat of a middle path: check once for each installation. It also made
more sense when there was less uniformity in the platforms in use.
That said: autoconf never really worked outside of Unix. You could make other platforms
Unix-like (eg. Cygwin, or even BeOS), but its claim to portability was always fairly
narrow.
U
d
we used to argue about that. I disliked autoconf
because I felt 99% of
the work could be precomputed, which is what MIT X11 Makefiles did:
they had recipes for the common architectures.
A point still being made:
So, okay, fine, at some point it made sense to
run programs to empirically determine what was supported on a given system. What I
don't understand is why we kept running those stupid little shell snippets and little
bits of C code over and over. It's like, okay, we established that this particular
system does <library function foobar> with two args, not three. So why the hell are
we constantly testing for it over and over?
Why didn't we end up with a situation where it was just a standard thing that had a
small number of possible values, and it would just be set for you somewhere? Whoever was
responsible for building your system (OS company, distribution packagers, whatever) could
leave something in /etc that says "X = flavor 1, Y = flavor 2" and so on down
the line.
And, okay, fine, I get that there would have been all kinds of "real OS
companies" that wouldn't have wanted to stoop to the level of the dirty free
software hippies. Whatever. Those same hippies could have run the tests ONCE per
platform/OS combo, put the results into /etc themselves, and then been done with it.
Then instead of testing all of that shit every time we built something from source,
we'd just drag in the pre-existing results and go from there. It's not like the
results were going to change on us. They were a reflection of the way the kernel, C
libraries, APIs and userspace happened to work. Short of that changing, the results
wouldn't change either.
--https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2024/04/02/autoconf/