[TUHS] Version 256 of systemd boasts '42% less Unix philosophy' The Register

[Alexis]

George Michaelson <ggm at algebras.org> writes:

> we used to argue about that. I disliked autoconf because I felt 
> 99% of
> the work could be precomputed, which is what MIT X11 Makefiles 
> did:
> they had recipes for the common architectures.

A point still being made:

> So, okay, fine, at some point it made sense to run programs to 
> empirically determine what was supported on a given system. What 
> I don't understand is why we kept running those stupid little 
> shell snippets and little bits of C code over and over. It's 
> like, okay, we established that this particular system does 
> <library function foobar> with two args, not three. So why the 
> hell are we constantly testing for it over and over?
>
> Why didn't we end up with a situation where it was just a 
> standard thing that had a small number of possible values, and 
> it would just be set for you somewhere? Whoever was responsible 
> for building your system (OS company, distribution packagers, 
> whatever) could leave something in /etc that says "X = flavor 1, 
> Y = flavor 2" and so on down the line.
>
> And, okay, fine, I get that there would have been all kinds of 
> "real OS companies" that wouldn't have wanted to stoop to the 
> level of the dirty free software hippies. Whatever. Those same 
> hippies could have run the tests ONCE per platform/OS combo, put 
> the results into /etc themselves, and then been done with it.
>
> Then instead of testing all of that shit every time we built 
> something from source, we'd just drag in the pre-existing 
> results and go from there. It's not like the results were going 
> to change on us. They were a reflection of the way the kernel, C 
> libraries, APIs and userspace happened to work. Short of that 
> changing, the results wouldn't change either. 

--https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2024/04/02/autoconf/


Alexis.