Re: Remove cdrtools
On 14-Aug-06, 15:59 (CDT), Michael Poole <mdpoole@troilus.org> wrote:
> Wouter Verhelst writes:
> > In the case of autotools, the fact is that usually it's configure.ac or
> > Makefile.am being horribly broken, rather than the autotools.
>
> In my experience, this is greatly exacerbated and perhaps even
> primarily due to older versions of autotools encouraging or requiring
> behavior that later versions of autotools declare to be broken.
That's *one* of the problems. If you only ever compile on Linux or *BSD,
it might seem the most common.
The *real* problem with the whole autotools disaster is that it promotes
a braindead idea of how to achieve portability: a #ifdef branch for
every different system (or library version, or whatever), strewn
throughout the entire codebase. Real portability involves understanding
your target systems, learning where the rough edges and corner cases
are, and developing proper abstractions to work around them. Oh, and
actually learning the standard version of the language (if there is
one), and being able to distinguish between "this is what the language
says it will do" and "works for me".
The sad thing is that Henry Spencer warned us 15 years ago[1], and
nobody learned a damn thing.
Steve
[1] http://www.literateprogramming.com/ifdefs.pdf
--
Steve Greenland
The irony is that Bill Gates claims to be making a stable operating
system and Linus Torvalds claims to be trying to take over the
world. -- seen on the net
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