[TUHS] Gnu/Stallman (was Bugs in V6 'dcheck')
arnold at skeeve.com
arnold at skeeve.com
Mon Jun 2 16:23:38 AEST 2014
John Cowan <cowan at mercury.ccil.org> wrote:
> Indeed. I rather like the Chicken Scheme approach: there is a Makefile
> fragment for each supported architecture, currently BSD, Solaris, Android,
> AIX, Haiku, iOS, MinGW with or without MSYS, Cygwin, Hurd, MacOSX,
> and Linux. If you want anything else, provide your own Makefile fragment.
This is only possible because of the standardization efforts at the
C and POSIX levels. Remember that Autoconf/Automake were invented to
solve the issue of all the forks: SunOS / Solaris / HP-UX / Ultrix /
MIPS / Pryamid / DG-UX / ad nauseum. Lots of things that were almost but
not quite entirely like V7 or System V Unix.
Today many of those players are no longer around, AND standardization of
header files and libraries means that C code is *more* portable than it
was in 1992. So there's less need for those tools *now*, but that doesn't
mean they didn't solve a real problem when they first came along.
I'll agree on most of the GNU complaints (and I'm a GNU developer...);
the original Unix "Small Is Beautiful" baby has been thrown out along with
the proprietary licensing bath water. Sigh. (Boy, was that a great use
for an old cliche, or what? :-)
Thanks,
Arnold
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