On 13 September 2017 at 20:53, Nemo <cym224@gmail.com> wrote:

On 12/09/2017, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote (in part):
> 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.

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