[TUHS] Gnu/Stallman (was Bugs in V6 'dcheck')

[arnold at skeeve.com]

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