On 20 Jun 2024, at 08:48, Kevin Bowling <kevin.bowling@kev009.com> wrote:

On Wed, Jun 19, 2024 at 11:59 PM Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:

<…>

So I did everything using (only) autoconf, including building and
using shared libraries,

This is The Way if you really care about portability. Autoconf, once you get your head around what, why, and when it was created, makes for nice Makefiles and projects that are easy to include in the 100 Linux distributions with their own take on packaging the world.

For those of a certain era, autoconf was both useful and relatively simple to use.

In an era of many, divergent Unices, with different compilers, shared library implementations, and varying degrees of adherence to standards, it made using FOSS a matter of ‘./configure && make && make install’ which was massively easier than what had been required previously unless you happened to have exactly the same platform as the author.

And to use it, you needed to understand shell, make, and m4, and learn a few dozen macros (at most). m4 was perhaps the least likely skill, but since it was used by sendmail(.mc), twmrc, X11 app defaults and various other stuff, most people already had a basic understanding of it.

In my view the modern rejection of autoconf as “incomprehensible” mostly suggests that the speaker comes from a generation that never used the original Unix toolset.