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

Henry Bent wrote: autotools isn't a magic wand for making portable apps, it's a toolkit for probing the environment to discover which alternatives are available. I'm sure it's a mysterious waste of time to those who didn't live through the Un*x wars, a time when there were multiple major things called Un*x, multiple major vendors, and available features changed frequently. Code can only be kept portable by building and testing and fixing it across all the platforms, which is time intensive, and given the closer alignment of systems nowadays doesn't get much effort. For a look at the effort I once invested in making/keeping a pet project portable look at the range of platforms I had to test on at http://ftp.regressive.org/finger/00README For a current project: https://www.regressive.org/snobol4/csnobol4/2.3/stats.html (I tested builds on Red Hat (not Enterprise!) 7.1 and FreeBSD 3.2) and https://www.regressive.org/snobol4/csnobol4/2.2/stats.html (includes OpenIndiana, a Solaris based distribution). I've never been an autotools fan; I've used it once, when I wanted to be able to build shared libraries across arbitrary platforms. I once used cpp for conditionalizing Makefiles, but that became unreliable once ANSI C hit the streets (ISTR throwing up my hands when I discovered "pee pee nums") The REAL evil of autotools is that it builds on the premise that all problems can be solved using #ifdef. I drank a different drink mix three decades ago: https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/sa92/spencer… But you're still stuck with having to discover what's available. Apache Portable Runtime or Boost are environments that try to smooth over some plaform differences (for varying values of some, depending on your needs), but that's a whole 'nuther belief system to buy into. Maybe this discussion needs to move to autoconf-haters? On the original topic, I keep imagining the systemd authors are are trying to build a monolithic system; an operating system inside an operating system that someday systemd will appear inside of. Then it will be "systemd all the way down". Followups to systemd-haters? P.S. Some earlier post complained about the complexity of writing rc.d scripts for FreeBSD; The current system only requires a script setting some variables.