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

[David Arnold]

> On 20 Jun 2024, at 16:37, Alexis <flexibeast at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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/

Which brings us back to imake (at least in xmkmf form), where if the pre-prepared settings matched your system, you were good and if not, you had a heap of work to set all the magic variables to have it build correctly. 

On classic MacOS, otoh, you’d compile against an SDK, but for each ROM/library symbol you wanted to use you were expected to check at runtime if it existed, and if not, switch to some alternative behaviour.

Autoconf was somewhat of a middle path: check once for each installation.  It also made more sense when there was less uniformity in the platforms in use.

That said: autoconf never really worked outside of Unix.  You could make other platforms Unix-like (eg. Cygwin, or even BeOS), but its claim to portability was always fairly narrow. 


U

d