14 Sep
2017
14 Sep
'17
7:18 a.m.
On 13 September 2017 at 20:53, Nemo <cym224(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 12/09/2017, Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote
(in part):
Henry Spencer's final commandment, as preserved at
https://www.lysator.liu.se/c/ten-commandments.html , seems particularly apt
here.
Even now, in the days of configure scripts and their ilk, if your code
blindly assumes that a "common" function will be present then it is
destined to fail somewhere.
-Henry
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.
N.