Re: Remove cdrtools
On Thursday 17 August 2006 19:02, Steve Greenland wrote:
> On 16-Aug-06, 20:49 (CDT), Peter Samuelson <peter@p12n.org> wrote:
> > As for useless autoconf tests - have you looked at how autoconf is
> > used? You pick the tests you think you need. It's not like the system
> > forces you to use a certain range of obsolete baseline tests. A huge
> > number of test macros are provided, but nobody forces you to use them.
>
> But everybody does, to the point where it now often takes (much!) longer
> to run configure than to actually build the program. And, for example,
> all of a sudden (autoconf 2.5, I think) every/many (newly generated
> or regenerated) configure script starting checking for C++ compilers,
> Fortran compilers, etc. etc. etc. even for pure C projects. I don't
> know if this is something that changed in autoconf, or something that
> changed in one of the higher level autotools. I don't particularly care.
> It's not whether or not autoconf itself requires this behavriour, it's
> that de-facto, *most* autotools using projects exhibit this behaviour.
> Probably because the examples or templates use it, and it's easier to
> use them unchanged than actually think about what they're doing.
>
> See, my argument is not that autconf *can't* be used in a wise manner;
> my argument is that it tends to lead to bad usage, widely propogated.
So are some widespread programming languages. If you blindly follow bad
examples and bad styles you can dynamite yourself happily without even
noticing, but that does not make them disused or abandoned (on the contrary
some of them have notoriously prolonged life cycle ;-)... it just matters who
is using them and how.
--
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