Re: OT: useless rant, Was: Building Subversion 1.2 on OS X 10.4 fails

On May 14, 2005, at 11:08 AM, Ben Collins-Sussman wrote:

> I think the problem is that Scott is grimacing at the the ugliness
> of the cure,
> having never seen the horror of the original disease. :-)

That's certainly part of it. One wonders how such systems attract
enough developers to survive.

> it *works*, because autoconf is a gigantic library of knowledge, a
> compendium of OS-specific quirks and workarounds gathered from
> thousands of programmers over many years. When you use it, you're
> standing on the shoulders of everyone's collective experience.

I think that is as much of the problem as it is a solution..
everyone and their dog took out their duct tape to patch one tiny
hole which happened to work for their one specific issue on there one
specific system... repeat that thousands of times and the result is
not going to be pretty.

No matter how bad the problem was in the past - I do not believe
there is a reason to check for fortran 77 before compiling
Subversion :). I also doubt very much that there is a supported
system in existence today that has 'C' but not 'stdio.h'. Quite
likely half of the collective knowledge in autoconf is obsolete -
simply because it only made sense for one of those thousands of
programmers on one specific system and such system combinations have
never occurred since.

Anyway... yes we are sufficiently off-topic... I only brought it up
because, well, it didn't actually work (see the earlier in the
thread). So I figured that was enough justification to go on a
little rant :)

I've vented and I am happy again.

Scott

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Received on Mon May 16 00:35:53 2005