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

[Rico Pajarola]

On Thu, Sep 14, 2017 at 2:53 AM, 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.
>
I also wept a bit when reading this. I once built gnome from source (don't
ask why), on Solaris, IRIX, and HP-UX. That was also the month I learned
how to use "autoconf" and "libtool" as swearwords...

But on modern Linux? That's not my experience. Maybe we just have different
standards for "just works", but a typical "modern" open source project
nowadays "just works" (for my definition of just works) on pretty much any
modern system including FreeBSD (type: ./configure; make && make install).


> N.
>
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