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

[ron minnich]

here's where I'd have to disagree: "./configure && make is not so bad, it's
not irrational, sometimes it's overkill, but it works"

because it doesn't. Work, that is. At least, for me.

I'm amazed: the autoreconf step on slurm permanently broke the build, such
that I am having to do a full git reset --hard and clean and start over.

Even simple things fail with autoconf: see the sad story here, of how I
pulled down a few simple programs, and they all fail to build. I replaced
them ALL with a single Go program that was smaller, by far, than a single
one of the configure scripts.
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1d0yK7g-J6oITgE-B_odadSw3nlBWGbMK7clt_TmXo7c/edit?usp=sharing

On Thu, Jun 20, 2024 at 1:35 PM Luther Johnson <luther.johnson at makerlisp.com>
wrote:

> 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>
> 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> wrote:
>>
>>> At Thu, 20 Jun 2024 01:01:01 -0400, Scot Jenkins via TUHS <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> 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>
>>>
>>> Kelowna, BC     +1 250 762-7675           RoboHack <woods at robohack.ca>
>>> Planix, Inc. <woods at planix.com>     Avoncote Farms <woods at avoncote.ca>
>>>
>>
>
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