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

[Rico Pajarola]

On Thu, Sep 14, 2017 at 1:11 PM, <arnold at skeeve.com> wrote:

> Rico Pajarola <rp at servium.ch> wrote:
> > 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).
>
> Like anything else, it depends on the quality, knowledge, and experience
> of the developers.  The problem isn't really the Autotools as much as
> inexperienced developers who don't understand that all the world is not
> Linux and who thus feel free to assume way too many things.
>
> We just went through the exercise of building the latest libpcap for
> Linux, Solaris, AIX and HP-UX.  Nightmarish, due to dependency upon
> flex, which in turn took an act of Congress in order to get it to build,
> particularly on AIX, but also not so easy on the others.
>
> OTOH, the older GNU projects, with experienced developers (gawk, Bash)
> don't exhibit such issues.
>
True, I'm amazed every time I try a really old version of some old GNU
software like bash 1.0 on a contemporary (but unusual) OS. No errors, no
warnings, nothing to fix-up manually. It just works.

My two cents (as one of those battle-scarred developers :-)
>
;)
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