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

[Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM)]

> This is The Way if you really care about portability. Autoconf,
> once you get your head around what, why, and when it was created,
> makes for nice Makefiles and projects that are easy to include in
> the 100 Linux distributions with their own take on packaging the
> world.

This is outright claptrap and nonsense.  In the latter half of the
90s I was responsible for writing installers and generating
platform-native packages for about a dozen different commercial
UNIX platforms (AIX, Solaris, Irix, HP/UX, OSF, BSD/OS, ...).  Each
of these package systems was as different as could be from the
others.  (HP/UX didn't even have one.)

That entire process was driven by not very many lines of make
recipes, with the assistance of some awk glue that read a template
file from which it generated the native packages.  And these were
not trivial software distributions.  We were shipping complex IMAP,
X.400 and X.500 servers, along with a couple of MTAs.  Our installers
didn't just dump the files onto the system and point you at a README;
we coded a lot of the site setup into the installers, so the end
user mostly just had to edit a single config file to finish up.

--lyndon