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

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

arnold at skeeve.com wrote:
 |Definitely getting off-topic here ...

Do not think so, my i386 had a 20 MB hard disc...

 |Steffen Nurpmeso <steffen at sdaoden.eu> wrote:
 |>|Libtool for sure. Autoconf is something you have to come to a negotiated
 |>|truce with and then it's OK. :-)
 |>
 |> I cannot seem to reach that state.  I see that the m4 directory of
 |> gawk v4.1.4 contains no less than 46 files with a total of 312 KB.
 |> On top of that the root directory contains some configure related
 |> files which sum up to about 500 KB.
 |
 |Gawk is light-weight compared to most projects that use gnulib (e.g,
 |grep).  Much of what you point out is boilerplate placed there by
 |the autotools.  The only file(s) I, as a developer, have to mess with
 |are the configure.ac files.
 |
 |> I do not know how much manual work was necessary for the files in
 |> m4,
 |
 |Once it's set up, you just ignore it, and update the files whenever

I only referred to its noise, not the comfort that it brings.

 |there's a new autoconf / automake / gettext / libtool release.

That update rate was quite high in the last years but seems to
have settled down again.  I became frustrated earlier, and stopped
to track many projects which no longer ship a pre-prepared
configure file via V-C-S, turning to tar bombs again.  That is
ugly, but having several versions of those tools around
concurrently to satisfy all those projects, no time.

 |I've been using autoconf since 1.x days, so I'm very used to it.
 |I also find it to be much less aggravation than CMake-based projects,
 |where if something craps out during the cmake run, you essentially
 |must wipe out the directory and re-extract the tarball to start over.

I do not know.  I once used perl for my configuration stuff, it
had to be available for OpenSSL anyway, and it was by default
installed on FreeBSD later on, anyway.  Also perl configures and
compiles out of the box on the Linux/BSD i had, and OpenSSL does
if there is perl.  So with vim which did not need anything i am
ready.

 |>  And when i look into the missing_d of gawk
 |> i cannot help to wonder what all that is for.
 |
 |Much of it is probably obsolete. Some things date back to the days
 |when some systems had strchr() and others had index()...

I hope it will be a fun project some day to port my stuff to elder
systems, before FreeBSD 4.7 / Solaris 9 / Linux 2.0.x.  Hopefully.
And i tend to write such simple functions my own anyway.  (I once
had the dream to end up with only me and the operating system, but
that is long gone.)

 |> But of course, what is the alternative?
 |
 |I don't see one. CMake doesn't really cut it for me.  For make
 |problems, port GNU Make; it's very portable, since it's one of the
 |base items for many GNU projects.
 |
 |I know it runs on Solaris 9.

Actually that made me kindly ignore the invalid definition of
UINTPTR_MAX and INTPTR_MAX on Solaris 5.9 and also replace a call
to iswblank(3) (i do not think it matters that much for now),
ending up with another credit of yours for the port to 5.9.
It was not about the make(1), actually, only /bin/sh we really
cannot afford but require /usr/xpg4/bin.  It was MAKEJOBS='-j X'
which resulted in -j being ignored and X standing alone and by
itself.  I never needed GNU make, the perl thing unrolled anything
and did not even use inference rules (in fact i did not understand
them back then.  And was not interested enough to learn!!
Terrible.)

 |> Plan9 shows an impressive beauty regarding this topic, but it, of
 |> course, is exclusive to a current Plan9.
 |
 |No arguments there, but unfortunately, Plan 9 is a very self-contained
 |sandbox.  Few of us get to live there all the time.

It is on a descending branch, so to say.

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)