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

[Luther Johnson]

I agree that there are certainly times when CMake's leverage has solved
problems for people. My most visceral reactions were mostly based on
cases where no tool like CMake was really required at all, but CMake had
wormed its way into the consciousness of new programmers who never
learned make, and thought CMake was doing them a great service. Bugged
the hell out of me, this dumbing-down of the general programming
population. My bad experiences were all as a consultant to teams that
needed a lot of expert help, when they had thrown CMake along with a lot
of other unnecessary complexity into their half-working solutions. So I
guess it was all tarred by the same flavor of badly conceived work. But
then as I tried to make my peace with the CMake build as it was, I got a
deeper understanding of how intrinsically irrational CMake is (and
again, behavior changing on the same builds depending on CMake release
versions.

So there certainly are times when something a little more comprehensive,
outside of make, is required. ./configure && make is not so bad, it's
not irrational, sometimes it's overkill, but it works ... but only if
the system is kind of Unix-y. If not you may wind up doing a lot of work
to pretend it's more Unix-y, so instead of porting your software, you're
porting it to a common Unix-like subset, then emulating that Unix-like
subset on your platform, both ends against the middle. That can be
ultimately counter-productive too.

I have an emotional reaction when I see the porting problem become
transformed into adherence to the "one true way", be it Unix, or one
build system or another. Because you're now just re-casting the problem
into acceptance of that other tool or OS core as the way it should be.
Instead of getting your thing to work on the other platform, by
translating from what your application wants, into how to do it on
whatever system, you're changing your application to be more like what
the "one true system" wants to see. You've given up control of your idea
of your app's core OS requirements, you've decided to "just give in and
be UNiX (or Windows, or whatever)". To me, that's backwards.

On 06/20/2024 12:59 PM, Warner Losh wrote:
> For me, precomputing an environment is the same as a wysiwyg editor:
> what you see is all you get. If it works for you, and the environment
> that's inferred from predefined CPP symbols is correct, then it's an
> easy solution. When it's not, and for me it often wasn't, it's nothing
> but pain and suffering and saying MF all the time (also not Make
> File).... I was serious when I've said I've had more positive cmake
> experiences (which haven't been all that impressive: I'm more
> impressed with meson in this space, for example) than I ever had with
> IMakefiles, imake, xmkmf, etc...  But It's also clear that different
> people have lived through different hassles, and I respect that...
>
> I've noticed too that we're relatively homogeneous these days:
> Everybody is a Linux box or Windows Box or MacOS, except for a few
> weird people on the fringes (like me). It's a lot easier to get things
> right enough w/o autotools, scons, meson, etc than it was in The Bad
> Old Days of the Unix Wars and the Innovation Famine that followed from
> the late 80s to the mid 2000s.... In that environment, there's one of
> two reactions: Test Everything or Least Common Denominator. And we've
> seen both represented in this thread.  As well as the 'There's so few
> environments, can't you precompute them all?' sentiment from newbies
> that never bloodied their knuckles with some of the less like Research
> Unix machines out there like AIX and HP/UX...  Or worse, Eunice...
>
> Warner
>
> On Thu, Jun 20, 2024 at 12:42 PM Adam Thornton <athornton at gmail.com
> <mailto:athornton at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>
>
>         Someone clearly never used imake...
>
>
>     There's a reason that the xmkmf command ends in the two letters it
>     does, and I'm never going to believe it's "make file".
>
>     Adam
>
>     On Thu, Jun 20, 2024 at 11:34 AM Greg A. Woods <woods at robohack.ca
>     <mailto:woods at robohack.ca>> wrote:
>
>         At Thu, 20 Jun 2024 01:01:01 -0400, Scot Jenkins via TUHS
>         <tuhs at tuhs.org <mailto:tuhs at tuhs.org>> wrote:
>         Subject: [TUHS] Re: Version 256 of systemd boasts '42% less
>         Unix philosophy' The Register
>         >
>         > "Greg A. Woods" <woods at robohack.ca
>         <mailto:woods at robohack.ca>> wrote:
>         >
>         > > I will not ever allow cmake to run, or even exist, on the
>         machines I
>         > > control...
>         >
>         > I'm not a fan of cmake either.
>         >
>         > How do you deal with software that only builds with cmake
>         (or meson,
>         > scons, ... whatever the developer decided to use as the
>         build tool)?
>         > What alternatives exist short of reimplementing the build
>         process in
>         > a standard makefile by hand, which is obviously very time
>         consuming,
>         > error prone, and will probably break the next time you want
>         to update
>         > a given package?
>
>         The alternative _is_ to reimplement the build process.
>
>         For example, see:
>
>         https://github.com/robohack/yajl/
>
>         This example is a far more comprehensive rewrite than is usually
>         necessary as I wanted a complete and portable example that
>         could be used
>         as the basis for further projects.
>
>         An example of a much simpler reimplementation:
>
>         http://cvsweb.NetBSD.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/external/mit/ctwm/bin/ctwm/Makefile?rev=1.12&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup&only_with_tag=MAIN
>
>         --
>                                                 Greg A. Woods
>         <gwoods at acm.org <mailto:gwoods at acm.org>>
>
>         Kelowna, BC     +1 250 762-7675           RoboHack
>         <woods at robohack.ca <mailto:woods at robohack.ca>>
>         Planix, Inc. <woods at planix.com <mailto:woods at planix.com>>
>          Avoncote Farms <woods at avoncote.ca <mailto:woods at avoncote.ca>>
>

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