[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie! [ really sun vs dec/apollo --> X and NeWS ]

[Henry Bent]

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

> On 12/09/2017, Larry McVoy <lm at 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
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